Water falls off the shale edge
It is brown in the summer shade
We’re in our creek shoes
Old sneakers on their way out
Performing a final service
There’s glass and cans and wires sometimes
Hard to see beneath the sliding brown glass

This is an expedition
We went under the cement arch under East Lake Road
Everything we do is kept safe by a benign democratic empire.
We are never bombed. No one ever destroys our homes. No one ever sprays us with machine gun fire.
We live in a wide miracle-space outside the historic flow of commotions.

We will slosh through the creek almost to the lake and then head back home in time for a nice dinner in a safe home where we are loved in a country where don’t have to agree with the government to stay out of trouble.

That was before.
Now we’re parceled out into outposts in little huddles with new families.
Or alone in a box in a building in a giant city that’s always mindlessly tapping its fingers on the ocean in the bay and out to sea.

We are now called
To
Go into the mystery
Into the mystic
Into the place
Beyond
what we
think we know are see

I see
slimy green streaks
growing on the shale
where the water thins and fans out, readying itself for the
drop

I see
political evil
and a will to top-down crime

I hear someone living 2016
quoting her father talking of the new president,
“I just want him to be the Godfather.”

I see generations
Shielded from blood and real fear
Watching mob movies and glorying in what is actually about as stupid and boring a life as one can choose

I see proud patriots living in their sitcom realities
And still finding a way to
Feel oppressed
And to
Pretend their home is on fire their water is cut off their food is rotten their speech is censored their God is outlawed their Truth is forced into hiding

There are real problems
Some have more than others
But the problems here don’t start to constitute an excuse
For failing to pay a modicum of attention and to choose reasonably plausible over conspiracy and to choose an imperfect but workable democratic republic that on the whole selects for reasonably good behavior and faithful stewardship over red ribbon incompetence laced with criminal intent

But yelling
Never saved
Anyone’s soul

So let us
Simmer down
And wade together
Into the warm summer creek
Into the mystic
God-or-Nature
Into the Light
that cannot lose, that will not die, that will guide us away from the worse and towards the better

Some afternoons in the wide clear but somehow brown creek
Last forever
And point the way