The first Saturday in a new year. The year is 2026. America as a republic, administered by a distribution of power, democratically – is finished. What comes next, has yet to be formed. A safe wager to be made that for now, the dismantling of the old status quo will proceed with dispatch.

A poem by Charles Bukowski seemed apt to present at this juncture. Here is a good portion of the poem. If you’d like to read the entire piece CLICK HERE

A View from the Quarter, March 12th, 1965

we are in a terrible hurry to die…

I awaken to pull a shade
open
I awaken to black men and
white men and no
men—
they rape everything
they walk into churches and
churches burn down
they pet dogs and dogs heave
yellow saliva and
die

they buy paintings that they
don’t understand
they buy women that they
don’t understand
they buy everything and
what they can’t buy
they kill…

at night
the sweetest sound I hear is
the dripping of the
toilet
or some unemployed Jazzman
practicing his runs—
a wail of martyrdom to an
always
incomplete
self
we only pretend to live
while we wait on something
we wait on something
and look at diamond wrist watches
through plate glass windows
as a spider sucks the guts out of a
fly…

I have watched the artists
rotting in their chairs
while the tourists took pictures
of an old iron railing not yet made
into guns

I have seen you, New Orleans,
I have seen you, New York,
Miami, Philly, Frisco, St. Louie,
L.A., Dago, Houston, and
most of the rest. I have
seen nothing, your best men are
drunks and your worst men are
locking them
up,
your best men are killers and
your worst men are
selling them
bullets

your best men die in alleys
under a sheet of paper
while your worst men
get statues in parks
for pigeons to shit upon for
centuries

the Jazzman stops. My god, it’s
quiet, that’s all I can say now!
it’s quiet, it’s quiet, let me think
if I feel like thinking and if
I don’t, mama, let me not think…

Charles Bukowski,
from Betting on the Muse

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Time enough for a tune, – this one, a requiem by Guns n’ Roses, November Rain, works.