Me and Trump

Where would I be without words, now that I'm almost there?

I'm speaking of the speechlessness I encounter when I try to speak of the present political moment, a speechlessness overfueled by speech, speech which often comes these days in a reactionary torrent, too much of it too easy, convenient, camoflauged as a necessity when it is in fact obsessive and often careless, as careless as cliche.

So that when I start to write them the words come so easily, trundling really on to the paper from ananimating disbelief in what I'm seeing and hearing, specifically in the political realm, and before I know it I've written a sentence, then a whole paragraph, and then a page or two, tempted to think of it not as poetry but as having, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling that the poet demanded of poetry.

But the words aren't right, though they might be the right words to describe the feelings I'm having, they just aren't quite right. And at a certain point in the writing of them they bog down, as if they know that they're just words, not so much that there are too few or too many of them, but try as they might they can never really make sense of what has happened, or what is happening. And all of the better feeling I have when I am writing comes to a screeching halt when I realize that for all the writing, for all the words I've used, I've made nothing clearer, I've explained nothing really, and that what I've been writing about is somehow incomprehensible.

Another writer said a poem is a momentary stay against confusion. Not that what I'm writing is poetry, I don't claim it as such, it's expository writing, a personal attempt to clarify my feelings as a citizen about our country's political situation by writing prose about it, for myself first and then for the few others who may find what I write useful. But it's no use, the writing, as good as it is sometimes, as pointed, sharp, witty, and engaged with the present moment as it can be, as necessary, as vital as it always seems to me at the time, the writing always fails, stalling out somewhere mid-air before reaching the end. It's not so much that the writer, me, feels exhausted; it's that the words themselves seem tired of being used, that they're being put upon to express something unworthy of them, something they shouldn't have been called upon to explain.

And so I give up the writing, put the pen aside, unable to make truth out of lies, having gotten nowhere other than making a phrase or two that bring a smile to my face or a sudden little insight made of what I hadn't seen before. Be content with that, a friend, another writer, says to me when I tell him of my predicament, or write about not being able to write about this political moment.  

I conclude: confusion is a cruel kind of propaganda; as a form of power it is ultimately powerless; real thoughts, real feelings don't have the words for it.