On Tyranny, Part III
“It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks.”
Michael Ruby
Susan Aberg, Protest in Berkeley, California (November 2025)
In the Aftermath
1
Our defeat bastes the pies in iron and persuades Burlingame to hunt for panopticons
No holiday pokes its soda in the bronze afterglow of the seaworthy hodge-podge, the lemon icing
of our altogether impractical
The sign language in our peace pipes hesitates to abolish the fragmentary prosecution
Inside the hothouse polygons for the protection of evildoers
Inside the pregnant messenger of these disputes
2
Our mistakes bend the esophagus
They pleck the eleven miles to the hoedown
They breathe shallow fish
A buffer for porkbelly futures
In a hamhanded central committee
Our mistakes rake the poison into the soil
They remonstrate, right?
The plug a mug with a slug
They plug a slug with a mug
They mug a slug with a plug
They mug a plug with a slug
They slug a plug with a mug
They slug a mug with a plug
They same
They pew
They sue
They sark
They mark
They stock
They puke
Mistakes
Mist aches
Miss takes
Mistakes
Stakes
Takes
Aches
*
Our mistakes rise like bread in the great ovens of yesterday
The Valkyries come back to our loyal/disloyal car shops and ambulatory fill-in-the blanks
Oh yes, oh yes, to haunt us in our alternate energies
It shouldn’t come from the oracle of intervention
Probably the best surprise since nobody could fix it
If the responsibility didn’t belong to anyone this side of the Golden Gate and signal Pullman and
partridge and parallel obligation
3
Our vision talked through the cereal flames of digestion
Such and such won’t become the belabored elucidation of far-fetched Philistine hopes and
dreams
No, yet another alternate reality among Montagnard tribesmen
In the sun and perfumed air of long-past ladies rooms
The rhizome looked like a good bet to occupy the signposts on the way to a dream neighborhood
The wild card might just pay off on the back nine of this little affair
Our vision ate the wrong food
Our vision of ovals
Our vision of lemons baked to a crisp
Our vision of foreign objects
4
Our destiny sits on a plate, alone, without condiments
Remember the destruction of temples in our lackadaisical hijinks
The raw teleology of ourselves on the road outta town
—November 10-18, 2024, not long after the election of Donald J. Trump to a second U.S. Presidency