 This first one's called No Consensus The groundhogs all disagreed about the future of weather today Maybe they're all right and the weather's gonna be disagreeable for a while Maybe forever The children of the drought have become the people of the flood We've got nothing left except extremes and a search for higher ground for some place where shadowed Don't keep secrets You know, I was hoping that this would stop being relevant, but it's titled 31st December 2016 It's the last day of the year the champagne's in the fridge There's a good stout in front of me and my love sits next to me on the couch in my house We're not going out The feeling in the air is not so much a festive affair But a people looking to get drunk Looking for a glass of oblivion before the year to come brings whatever doom the liquor store can't solve We're not going out Bukalic threats political regrets. That's what the body politic is made of We live in childish times, but we'll grow up fast when we have to Soon a couple of weeks almost there and we'll get to know what it means when the carpet baggers and robber Barons are in charge of things We sit a vigil by the clock waiting for the year to die first day of January 2017 Tomorrow is here. It's the new year and the millennium still in its infancy Fireworks make me flinch. So I stay indoors My neighbor's party guests call for more backyard bombs to make them laugh thick-throated loose-limbed Americans before the fall from business as usual from complacence and convenience From expectations. We've been reared for red party cups cheap gas The world at our feet. I Turned 49 this year. This is called 49 My friend who is a rock star big in Japan explained that seven is a power number in Buddhism and That seven times seven is an important year Apparently after you die your soul circles the cosmos 49 times Until you pick your parents and land inside your mother Interesting more interesting than zombie Jesus Although it pains me to think I chose my parents. I guess they needed me colonized American daughters English has left me speechless in at least three other languages My mother tongue ate up all the words that might have been mine If you can't say it you can't think it and you can't do it What's left all that's left a few family keepsakes Some quaint old trinkets a recipe or two Self-loathing a desire to fit in This is how wisdom gets lost and never comes home Life is sweet as sugar skulls Skeleton dancers shake in the sheets invoking our ancestors blessing on lovers Loving life and remembering that death isn't separate but a part of it Artifacts of other people's memories of us on altars glowing in the dark a walk in the park the bright moon I Wonder what will be left of you of me of us a chart of low tides an Overdue library book soft soft cotton sheets and Then one more the mysteries of epistemology get passed from axon to dendrite and in spite of best Intentions we reproduce our thinking far more often than we change our minds and The more we assume we know anything about what anybody thinks we are wrong For example, how is it that so many thought that white supremacy was such a marginal even fringe perspective in our time That we wouldn't see how one old racist could supercharge race hate into the mainstream So fast don't sit back. This is a tap an attack on the body politic It has its own metaphysics and it's time to get on the metacognition That's recognition of what we think and why and how we came to know what we think we know So we can undo Undo undo redo We are all Something more than stimulus collecting machines Thanks y'all. Thanks Kim. Thanks library