January 2025

As the Mills River Fire substation burned,

I was thinking about Terrance McKenna

describing the dangers of DMT as death by astonishment.

And thinking about Donald J. Trump

becoming president again, and remembering

how the boundary dissolving of my first marriage

left my heart in a hospice bed with a morphine drip,

the trauma survivor speechless,

trapped in the slow flashback.

Our final extinction by bewilderment and shame and loss,

less like passing on than by bringing down

an inexplicable flood

of sociopathic landslides and billionaires,

until after the hurricane event, proud generations of mountain folk

live in winter encampments, waiting for the insurance check that never comes,

rounded up and sent back to nowhere

that exists on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

The utilities are offline; bridges crushed under the weight of old growth.

The spiritual place of our ancestors abandoned after we took our vows,

leaving only media platforms, without enlightenment all those last conversations

 uprooted everything, and left us with so much damaged stuff

as mangled as a divorce decree, taking history with it

until even the main roads are impassable.

Yet my heart holds (still) if not to unconditional love

then to the warmth of a farm store

that might have propane for the hotplate and ice for the cooler.