Salty butter melting seductively on warm, crusty bread.

The first sip of coffee in the morning.

Runny yolks on a white ceramic plate.

The broken, salty, crispy bits at the bottom of the chip bag.

The shade of a giant oak, and sitting on its cool torso, in the heat of summer.

The humming of cicadas.

The cutting of afternoon grass, the laughter of children just down the street.

The wrinkled fingers of a grandmother rubbing down her cat. He jumps down and races to the bedroom, seeing things that only a cat can see.

She takes a sip on her tea. Then she puts on her glasses. She picks up the TV guide, takes her pen and circles the good programs of the day. The pen and the book, they both shake. She stops. Her bladder’s full and she’ll have to get up. She sighs. She looks out of the window, out toward a young girl whose skirt is blowing playfully in the wind.

When she was young, she remembers.

Oh, when she was young and light.

And lithe, and enjoyed life.

And met her husband downstairs at five and walked to the corner shop and got ice cream and talked about the day and the tomorrow and the next 50 years of their lives.

When everything was fit, young and healthy, and everyone she knew was alive.

And life tasted good.

And her husband took the ice cream that had dripped down her chin in his finger and licked it and smiled, and she’d wished they were alone.

Summer days by the lake. Summer nights on the porch.

In summer, the world is a beautiful place, and everyone remembers the good days, and the good tastes, before the first snow drops and cold flattens the earth.

When isn’t time?

When isn’t time?

When wasn’t the sand?
When wasn’t the sand rough?
When wasn’t it sand, but rock?
And when wasn’t that rock not rock
but mountain
and that mountain a thick, hot earthly pus
flowing out onto the bubbling sea
that was but isn’t here now?

The sand is dry.
The moon in the desert is bone-white.
It is bone-dry, and hard,
a dry, dead knuckle that sticks out into the clear night
amongst the stars tiny and white like speckles of dust and stains.

Thunder like a weak drum rolls off in the distance.
A listless yellow wind blows through the scraggly,
singing, ancient bush — 
and it is cold.

Unimaginable cold — a heathen cold — 
enough cold to sink through your pores — 
enough cold to sink to your bones
and shudder, and shudder away the moisture.

Dried twigs don’t shudder, they break.

Sand is just rock and dead trees and seashells
nothing lasts long in the wind
nothing survives in the desert

but the sand.

In consideration of events which have occurred, and looking back, occurred unsurprisingly, I present a very modest proposal.

To clarify, we first of all need to state an obvious truth: white people voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. In fact, I’m willing to venture that every white person in this country has a family member or close friend who voted for Trump. Every white person.

If only non-white people had voted, Clinton would have won by a landslide.

Truths.

White people decided to vote for Trump, that is the first obvious truth.

The second one is: people of color, some or many of your white friends and white allies voted for Trump.

When he suggested banning all Muslims, they said, “Oh, how horrible.”

When he mocked a disabled reporter, they said, “Oh, how horrible.”

When he degraded women over and over, they said, “Oh, how horrible.”

When he called all Mexicans rapists, they said, “Oh, how horrible.”

When he assumed all black people live in utterly deplorable conditions, they said, “Oh, how horrible,” as they say, “Oh, how horrible,” when black men and women are gunned down by the police.

And they still voted for him.

Truths.

The third truth, which draws from that, links through his speeches of hatred and incitement and backwardness, and ends up as a natural development: white people voted for change, for the sake of change, over our basic right to life, for the sake of life.

Because it isn’t Donald Trump the man who won. It is Donald Trump the ideology, the alt-right (white supremacists) boosted onto a seat of power in the White House.

These are the three truths, like them or not.

So, now for the proposal.

I propose, very simply, that we just move on. I don’t mean move on and forget about it. I mean it in a rather different way.

Very quickly: I am a Christian. I have a friend. He is a Muslim. I talk to him about many things, we joke, we argue sometimes, we hang out. But we never really discuss religion in that specific sense, because I know where he stands. I don’t have to ask him: “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior?” because he would laugh and look at me strangely.

I know where he stands, firmly, and he knows where I stand.

I hereby propose we do the same for race relations.

All white people, regardless of their words, their good intentions, their admonishments and despair, all white people should be placed by non-white people firmly into that camp over there, and we should place ourselves in ours here.

We can talk about everything: music, life, death, philosophy, but when it comes to that shattering topic, we’ll purse our lips and avoid the topic.

Black people should stop pretending to care about white people’s opinions on race relations. White people should stop pretending to care about black lives.

The only way we can heal is by recognizing the thing that pains us, the real root of our race problems: pretense.

We will not hug and preach about race, we will not sit them down and teach them about something that is widely available on the internet if they just looked. We will not talk to them because they will not listen, and we know this because we’ve been talking for 400 years and our voice is hoarse and our heart sinks.

I imagine it is the pain of the mammy, having raised the white child, and being loved by that child, seeing that white child grown up and standing under a tree, a smirk on his face, his eyes glinting while her own black son swings from that rope, swings painfully in the wind, for the reason of:

he looked at me the wrong way

he looked at her the wrong way

he gave sass

he didn’t know his place

he moved towards me threateningly

he ran away from me threateningly

I feared for my life

he is just black.

I will end this by saying — this is not hate. This is not the face of hate.

This is anger. And all anger is a truth, lingering or sudden.

When you expose a truth, you are exposing, in reality, a fissure, a length of disconnection stretching throughout the history of an event.

Our event has been occurring in perpetuity for far too long, long before the founding of this white nation.

We have been locked outside of our own homes.

White people consider us dogs pouting outside of their homes. We look up at the sky as the sun sets on this American house, knowing full well and in despair that it will rise again on that same thieving house.

There is no love lost if there is no expectation of love. There is no disappointment. Disappointment is the mismatch between one’s expectations and one’s reality. Either you lower your expectations, or you raise your reality.

Our reality has been stuck on this level and it moves only an inch for every hundred years.

Let us lower our expectations, let us guard our hearts, let us all stop the pretense.

A Very Modest Proposal was originally published in This Glorious Mess on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every poem I’ve ever written is an epitaph

and every thought I have an afterthought,

like a memory;

And every memory an action that I didn’t take

or one I took but wish I hadn’t;

And every wish I have a silent admission

of an action that I will never take,

a box full of receipts and love letters

hidden inside a closet.

And when your wife is in the shower

and your children are fast asleep

and you’re lying in bed, TV on,

your eyes fixed on the door handle,

and you wish, you wish, you wish:

if I’d only had more time.

Blackbird, blackbird,

little blackbird

teetering atop my mail post —

don’t you know the storm is coming?

It’s coming real soon.

You and your mudly-brown beak,

the color of a rotten peach,

your cries are nothing blackbird

against the yellowing clouds

and the dry wind

and the small electricity

hanging above us all

like a noose looped from a tree.

Your wings are magnificent,

young blackbird,

and you could have flown away

through the pale clouds

and been free.

But now it is too late

and the storm is coming

and I will close my shutters

and draw my curtains

and pray for you like no one prays for me.

The blackbird in the storm was originally published in This Glorious Mess on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Give me a heart

give me a kiss

give me a star.

Give me a hug

give me a dream

give me the moon

It really isn’t so far

and the night is crisp

and the sounds travel

like mist on a dark-blue ocean

I always find that

poems are too long.

Just punch me in the face already,

shoot me and run away.

Don’t strangle me dear

with that slow awkward massage

that moves like a cog from an old machine.

I have no patience for surrendering.

I only want death.

Quick,

easy,

painful.

Naming a daughter is like

separating a sea from an ocean

or judging how tall a mountain is with your thumb

or tasting snow flakes in a blizzard

or catching fish in a river

or walking in the snow at 4am to CVS for Huggies and gummy bears

while a window behind in the distance is dimly lit

and a shadow watches out at you.

How soft

how given to us

how beautiful it is

how much we have been given

in the night

like a thunder rolling in from the sea

how hard we look in the distance

to see how quickly it moves

how soon the night crashes against the day

like the water breaking against the shore

how suddenly cold the air feels when you move your hand away from mine

to brush your hair and place your hand at your side

-as if i had said the world was closing

-as if i hadn’t known you wanted more from me.

But here’s the truth —

When a woman asks you if you love her, what she really means is:

can you be a better man than my father?

I whispered no and turned away to the storm.

i keep still. in my chest
by my heart’s tremor i feel a beating

like the wings of a bird
being choked to death against the walls
of its cage.

i feel like the ocean that remains silent
when the drowning body screams

as it is swallowed whole — feeling,
in essence,
the part of the witness,
and the murderer.

i walk along the edge of the room
like the edge of a roof

afraid i might fall off,
or, even worse,

fall into the trap of my mother
crying, there,
by herself,
letting the tears fall
on the butter and the bread
by the table,

where her sons
couldn’t lift a finger

grab a napkin, paper towel,
living room carpet,

shirt from the back of their ungrateful bodies,
to catch the tear
so that the neighbors below

won’t hear the crash
when it breaks the ground.

we all break away with time;

so i don’t know
whether it was a dream or a memory

when i was young
and almost drowned,
my arms reaching to the shore

and my mother,
sitting fully clothed,
turned her head, and looked at the sky

where the birds flew over the trembling ocean
to the sun,
where it was warm.

The Breaking — a Poem about Family was originally published in This Glorious Mess on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.