On the Naked State of Madness

how will we survive when we can't agree on what's real?

there’s been a kind of fug of bloodthirst in the air lately—you can feel it—the way people are lined up behind a subway strangler, calling him a superhero,

which has less to with the narrative of what actually happened than it does with the people who acted and were acted upon—their categories superseding their lives, and the fundraising shows it

the way things that once decorum, or common sense, or propriety, veiled are fully exposed—flat-earthers proudly proclaiming their idiocy, antisemites, the racists who were always loud now getting louder, marching on the Washington Mall in ranks in chinos, the way every protestor runs the risk of getting plowed into by a car because the model’s been set—

after all, this is a country where attending any public gathering or entering any public building carries a small but not infinitesimal risk of dying in a cataclysm of gore, and a higher risk of witnessing one, carrying those hours you spent crouched in a dressing-room stall at a mall praying for your life with you forever—

a fraying at the seams so pronounced that any commonality is threadbare—a fishnet stocking of a polity in a freezing gale of hate—

—this is my sense, anyway, looking at the fractured bits of news that float my way
as they do
all day
every day

it’s hard to remark on this sense that things have changed without minimizing what came before, which was centuries of violence

—it’s just that, just now, everything happens so fast, and everyone finds out at all at once—the ones who care to know, anyway—and no one agrees on what happened—

and once the common starting point is no longer “the earth is spherical” and “the president is the president” well—that’s a recipe for fracture—a crack in the bones of the thing—

not every bone can knit itself back together—not every life finds its way safely off the F train—

If you’re wondering at the lack of sentences, well I am tired of mirroring my country’s collapse—myself & myself at odds about what’s real all the time—so have an emdash or twenty

writing about one’s madness from the midst of it is a lot like showing your nude body to a crowd: you have to be accustomed to it—and it has consequences—and I am tired of that, too—not every bone knits cleanly—not every mind finds its way back—

every year has felt like its own annus horribilis until the next one,

like finding one stratum deeper on the sea floor each time.

where the strange fishes swim, with fat instead of swimsacs, and eyes the size of moons, and fossils of stranger fishes hide in the silt

every year a little colder and the pressure more fierce

a blobfish doesn’t really look like that soft pink clown face you know, it’s built for the deep sea and in its element it is prickly, scaled, slick-finned

not every creature survives being hauled into the light

I think all of us would like to be able to go to the mall some times and sniff a scented candle and not wonder if the backs of our heads are going to be gouged out

and not wonder who will cheer if that happens—

and how many millions of people will decide it didn’t happen at all

the occipital bone that protects the brain is thinner than the femur

the one that gets you running if you need to run

I am tired so tired of being mad in every sense of that word and doing so in public—this naked madness is a madness of its own—

and were this a different year and I a different woman this would be a sestina

polished and turned-out you could balance each syllable on a pin

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but it isn’t—it’s this one—fractive and diffuse—a year of bloody wombs and automatic fire

the culmination of a titanic amount of organization and time and zeal from a variety of lobbying organizations on subjects such as gun regulation and the autonomy of the female human has led to the world of the present and the red open jaws of the future

are you better off than you were four years ago?

buddy I can’t remember four years ago
sometimes it gets so bad I can barely remember my name

entirely new lifeforms emerge every day from subaqueous filth; this era of life, the Plasticine—

& more & more it seems the national business is madness in public
a planned obsolescence of the citizen and all they consume, everything breakable especially us

when I was a kid I tripped broke my wrist running because I was happy

but some osteoblasts go awry
not every bone knits all the way

and it was morning and it was evening it was Tuesday