I live in a country that can make torture boring, where death from the sky is less argued about than putting a sick dog to sleep, where people decline and renew their empathy in four year installments depending on whether their guy wins, where we rule and are ruled by our neighbors from the privacy of a voting booth. I live in a country where hate is a given, the only question is who you're gonna hate-- whether it's politicians or businessmen running this place into the ground, and whatever problem you choose, the solution's always the other one. What group of broke as hell characters that don't give a damn what Rachel Maddow thinks of them you'd rather see cut off from what little gasp of free action that slip into their lives. Whose turn is it, the light skinned ones in the trailer parks and backwoods or the dark skinned ones in the rezes and blocks and barrios, or the ones of all shades by the tracks and in tent cities by the river? Remember, ‘none of the above’ is not an answer. Remember, ‘all of the above’ is, and it’s this place’s favorite answer. These people gotta know there's gonna be a reckoning for finding their own ways to scratch by without ever doing the same jobs as the dads in the sitcoms, for refusing to die or disappear no matter how hard the jails tug like a magnet. But hey, we got choices here, like who gets flooded out when the storm hits: flyover country or city neighborhoods where the pizzas don't get delivered? Like are you gonna leave your home voluntarily, or will they have to drag you out by force?

And hey, we got people working to make things better. Too bad that most who fit that description worry that people here take the words in military funerals a little too seriously, words like "sovereignty", "liberty", "self-reliance", "independence", lies in the mouths of those who ordered them carved in marble but dangerous when taken too deep to heart. Their biggest problem with this place seems to be that we don't ask enough people before we speak or get a drink of water, that we don't know how to live as a community so they hunt for those that do but don't use the word and draft them against their will into one big Community with a capital ‘C’ that you can't run away from. But this ain't Europe yet, thank god. There's still wilderness to flee to. Even when our actions are data fed through a calculator trying to build an empire out of the most tolerable intolerability, the results still come up short.

I write this from the rust belt, this country’s sacrifice zone except for all the other ones, like maybe you, like maybe me too. It's a place where the banks put door and window shaped stickers on plywood to trick the shortsighted out of looting their building's copper guts, where you got better odds of winning the radio station prize money from recognizing Rihanna and Ke$ha songs than you got of finding a job, where the hospitals get dark after 7 but you can watch the colors of the casino lights dance the night away, where other people my age that aren't from here applaud their own courage for living in the same neighborhoods as toddlers and eighty-year-olds. A place that nearly has me convinced ashes aren't enough. I spent the morning in Flint, redecorating a statue of the founder of GM with whiskey bottles and styrofoam and a cardboard sign saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD... NEVER MIND, YOU WILL, exploring a maze built for water but now more a home for spray paint and chalk, swastikas I turned into four square boards, upside down crosses and right side up crosses, hearts and gangtags, FAIR IS FOR LOSERS AND I WANT TO WIN and IN THE END EVERYTHING WILL BE OK, IF ITS NOT OK ITS NOT THE END, all the marks that this place is more alive than you think, all the signs of civil wars to come. Like the WE'LL MISS YOU banner hung from a railroad bridge someone I never knew was killed on, like the knife carving in a truck stop bathroom stall saying "I need god to forgive me" and below it, "just ask". All the things people feel hard enough to not mind breaking the law to say.
I got these silly ideas about this place, like that I can trust it not to kill me, like even if rubble's not enough, it's a start, like that I can talk my way out of destitution saying things my heart knows to be true, no matter how my eyes talk bag, like I can keep adding to my birthday collection with scammed copies of copies of copies of what a shitty and wonderful place this is, and if claps were pennies, we'd have enough gas to get to the west coast on these poems, these postcards from hostile territory saying Wish you weren't here. Wish I wasn't either.