Kathleen

“José

What now, José?
The party’s over,
the lights are off,
the crowd’s gone,
the night’s gone cold,
what now, José?
what now, you?
you without a name,
who mocks the others,
you who write poetry
who love, protest?
what now, José?

You have no wife,
you have no speech
you have no affection,
you can’t drink,
you can’t smoke,
you can’t even spit,
the night’s gone cold,
the day didn’t come,
the tram didn’t come,
laughter didn’t come
utopia didn’t come
and everything ended
and everything fled
and everything rotted
what now, José?

what now, José?
Your sweet words,
your instance of fever,
your feasting and fasting,
your library,
your gold mine,
your glass suit,
your incoherence,
your hate—what now?

Key in hand
you want to open the door,
but no door exists;
you want to die in the sea,
but the sea has dried;
you want to go to Minas
but Minas is no longer there.
José, what now?

If you screamed,
if you moaned,
if you played
a Viennese waltz,
if you slept,
if you tired,
if you died…
But you don’t die,
you’re stubborn, José!

Alone in the dark
like a wild animal,
without tradition,
without a naked wall
to lean against,
without a black horse
that flees galloping,
you march, José!
José, where to?”
― Carlos Drummond de Andrade

“Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you,
As a fish out of water hears the waves . . . Come back. Come back.
This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.”
― Rumi

“A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured… Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination – the logical end point – of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protection. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“the stories that produced [Trump] were always contested. There were always other stories, ones that insisted that money is not what’s valuable, and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the natural world… while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need