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
Andrew Levy
Memories from the Surroundings of Manhattan from the Time of the Occupation
A seamless connection wherever you are, no ceiling suspension
that’s sustainable. In a couple minutes, another federal government
will tilt your hat to the wealthy and well-connected shutdown,
agree to ridiculousness someone interjects into the future. To make it more
complicated they do nothing but raise the debt. A motion to suspend
the dashboard limit is a courtesy, an ear to combat pediatric cancer. Medi-
caid has not been able to do so. In the ear the sky is only just invisible,
a field in the larger landscape. Something in glittering objects, in biblical
privilege to pass votes to suspend rules to make the way to the floor
an insurgence until mid-March. The best care out-of-state, and seniors
is a lot of money in the commercial market, but kids, for whatever reason
an economy doesn’t exist to resuscitate the acoustic ransom of someone
who doesn’t exist. They hadn’t this stuff with cancer starting all over again.
It’s the ordinary enfolded into the atmosphere in which we hear what
comes after intelligible thought. The side-deal to cut funding
to the poor, the house at the end of nature and all the billionaires to do
business in China. A final solution—signing into law (would you hide me?)
an imagination split among de facto bounties on one’s head.
JD Vance at the Subterranean Orgy
Do you remember any part of your earliest experiences,
On a tacit level, of a larger environment? Are they mere lies,
Minor secrets, and words? Whose are they? How long
Have they been alive? In the glittering object, smaller images
Land on the wrong aperture, a dialectic of sound. I hear the
Mechanisms of artifice as they complete the world. The
Antiphonies in politics, the selected policy.
Have you ever climbed a tree? Enjoyed green days
In a beautiful garden, an heir of things once unknown?
Made investments in carbon sequestration projects? In any
Case, war or not, we are not required to play the parts
That others have written. Pumping subglacial water out, fifty
Percent? Seventy percent? You become something
Not quite human and have lost your mind.
Big Balls
The damages they are inflicting, the life-threatening storms.
The numbers not adding up.
Sparks note version of conservative rhetoric what
Does it do in real time? What’s its full impact?
Imagine what that’s going to look like.
These are not stories to put in the Ponzi scheme tube. Callous
Indifference comes too late for analysis, not confusion.
Populist energy isn’t dissipating. The most vulnerable people
Are not profitable. The collision of cruelty spread measles.
Something geo-political sounds off on America’s democracy.
Don’t go anywhere. One versus the other.
Thousands of innocent people die. On trains, planes using AI,
or not. In just seconds, learn what life is worth.
Our body is a river with jackboots coming.
Putting their Hands on Others in Anger
What should writers do? We’re not going to settle
it on the highway.
A sustained and steady approach surges. Below ground in the
wintertime, because they’re warm, they take refuge.
You may be eligible.
Am I dying?
Exactly.
What do you feel?
The skeleton of a chair, the pole of a lamp, fruit boxes, the bottoms
and sides of wardrobes, iron hinges.
A complete freedom, it eliminates all traces of ceremony.
In the moonlight, all sorts of odds and ends. The world around us
will never create disorder.
Navigators lose themselves up the garden path.