What He Wants

  Another sleepless night in the world of Trump.

Dictators want to occupy your every thought. They exist to subsume your individuality with thoughts of them, him, only him, ever him, eternal and without interruption, him, that joke of a man, that voice, that hair, that gold plated shitcloud turning us all into him. Even those of us who hate him become Trump, hear his every thought broadcast into our heads until we dream Trump and breathe Trump and his monologue sings over silence where once were thoughts.

The temptation to retreat is overwhelming: you have that luxury. Divorce from the news and arm yourself with a barrage of selfish entertainment: movies, music, fiction; yet the valves feel clogged and your guts ready to implode on themselves unless you say something, lash out, write, write, write; you can feel the black dog creeping up, breathing at the back of your legs as inertia takes you over and the slobber paralyzes. You must act, you must write, you must strike back to claim fate as you own, but in what direction? What direction leads us to life, and where leads us to death?

Our minds are beset by the exact paralysis he wants, knowing that two months and eleven days into his world, everyone is so sore and disoriented that any attempt to exercise your voice will change something in the life you constructed so carefully to keep the dog at bay for as long as its jaws let go. Anything you say, anything at all, is bound to offend somebody, because you know that eventually you must commit to some belief, some action, some movement, that can go so wrong that if a couple thousand of us move in unison, it can forge its link in a chain of reactions that imprisons the world for a hundred years. Not that you have that power, but in times of revolution, the world acts as though everyone does, and your little world certainly acts that way.

You have to write, you have to speak out, you have to commit, you have to go on the record, but with what? You can't even hear yourself think anymore. Something is in there, a mental bowel movement, constipated and screaming from your very guts to shit and sing it out. But what melody is it? No matter how right it will sound in your head when you hear it, you know that any score you compose will sound shit brown in the ears of any reader. However powerful the opus, you still can't hear it, but you can smell it, and the odor is rank.