• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Democracy Chronicles

Towards better democracy everywhere.

  • AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
  • WORLD DEMOCRACY
  • POLITICAL ART
  • more
    • election technology
    • money politics
    • political dissidents
    • THIRD PARTY
      • third party central
      • green party
      • justice party
      • libertarian party
    • voting methods
  • DC INFO
    • author central
    • about
    • advertise with DC
    • contact
    • privacy policy
You are here: Home / DC Authors / Ascension

Ascension

August 20, 2023 by Jamie Lampidis Leave a Comment

FacebookLinkedInPinTweet

We live in mean Mars-rocketed times:
cloudy, ascendingly obscure in the wrong ways,
and transparent down to the bottom of the bone dried-out always summer-scorched reservoir in others.
A real reality show for the prurient, unimaginative gingham clothed mother-fuckers in their too-safe spaces:The New World pioneering Americans.
Even me, yes, I’m guilty.
I want to go back to the past as it never was.
I want to relive it cleaner, hipper, more real, but safe without real choices.
To choose. To be. To know in real-time.
Watching in inert dumbfoundedness at the dizzying spectacle unfolding–at least.
I have that in the back pocket of my jagged black jeans.
America you’re “out there” with all of your hard bright irreconcilable contradictions, long daze of literalized violence (“gun play”) and wild, silent Internet globed irony.
I’m not talking of your revolutionary pirate ship posse here, either.
Does that even exist?
Let someone fly that torn blackish flag if they can find it.
I’ll join you later at the eleventh hour.
It’s too faux-tattered for me in my mind;
It can’t be a way out.
This is no cryptography. There is no hidden key.
We’ll all die by the complacently untaken steps of the vital center,
or live by the rash steps of the fringe dwellers.
In the end, we’ll all be fringe dwellers– ecstatic or otherwise–with muddy cuffs on our jagged jeans.
The Nineties suburbs were bright guilty places though full of the ersatz optimism you’d find in shiny Toothpaste ads from the fifties.
The cities have always been shadowy expanses with a bit of “extra” as the kids say today. But you can always get extra foam on your double macchiato at a Starbucks in Coral Gables
or Brooklyn or Endecino.
So let’s gang up on Disney for teaching teens about the world while a Presidential candidate advocates for open carry laws in a nation run amok in gun killings.
I wonder what it feels like to be obscure and young,
seeing all of this as something you have to walk through
and for some, even, carry not knowing if the world will be around as we know it in thirty years. The way we know it. Knew it,
Don’t know it, now.
What happens to the doe-eyed innocents?
The far-sighted would be prophets.
The silver-hearted listeners.
The keen-eyed wildflowers.
The gimlet-spirited realists.
The pale souled witnesses.
Your ruby-stained heart on their sleeve friend.
The gauche lovers fumbling in the shadows.
The gray-pink lost-on-the-hard scrabble street sentimentalists.
The earnest idealists who swam with you at the quarry.
The taupe-clothed strivers reaching for their townhouse keys after work.
But maybe the times have always been full of fallen heroes and strange rabbit-holed contradictions that don’t rise to real, lived paradoxes.
Have you thought of it too, Ambrose Alivening?
Maybe the Church bell has always rung a little high hollow for too many.
Maybe the ad-tinged hopeful optimism fails.
Maybe the escapism doesn’t hold water.
Maybe the steps not taken.
The terrifying near misses.
The terrifying hits.
Maybe the imagined aspirations don’t become spoken words amid the gay cacophony of all those people who aren’t very happy.
That’s what I’m beginning to think.
It’s alright, Ma.
I was only praying.
I tried like a broken-winged red-eyed eagle in a late August storm
What else did I expect?
A flight?
An ascension?
A way out.
The only way out is on the muddy ground below.
I will walk like everyone else with scraped bloody knees.
“People need hope, too,” my mother said.
She had read what I wrote.
We will all be gurus to each other–
In the end.

FacebookLinkedInPinTweet

Filed Under: DC Authors

Some highlighted Democracy Chronicles topics

Africa American Corruption American Local Elections American State Elections Asia Capitalism and Big Business Celebrity Politics China Democracy Charity Democracy Protests Democrats Dictatorships Education Election History Election Methods Election Security Election Transparency Europe Internet and Democracy Journalism and Free Speech Middle East Minority Voting Rights Money Politics New York City and State Elections Political Artwork Political Dissidents Political Lobbying Redistricting Republicans Russia Socialism and Labor Social Media and Democracy South America Spying and Privacy Supreme Court Third Party Voter Access Voter ID Voter Registration Voter Suppression Voter Turnout Voting Technology Women Voting Rights Worldwide Worldwide Corruption

About Jamie Lampidis

For years, Jamie Lampidis drifted from one graduate teaching associateship to another lecturing gig with an odd nonprofit and many document review projects thrown in for flavor. He sometimes said, and in fact was an itinerant dreamer. While he never rode the freights, he did slog his way across Columbus, Ohio, North Conway, New Hampshire, points in New Jersey, Rhode Island and of course Brooklyn. Occasionally, there were imaginative flights. At other times, there were long silences. He has found a home for the last six years teaching at Medgar Evers College (CUNY). He hopes to continue dreaming, or, at least, writing with fewer silences.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

democracy chronicles newsletter

american democracy around the web

  • CPJ, partners call on British PM to push for...
    Source: Committee to Protect Journalists Published on: 8 hours ago
  • “As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats...
    Source: Election Law Blog Published on: 9 hours ago
  • “Misinformation research is buckling under GO...
    Source: Election Law Blog Published on: 13 hours ago
  • “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Flirts With the Libert...
    Source: Election Law Blog Published on: 13 hours ago
  • “In North Carolina, Republicans Seek More Con...
    Source: Election Law Blog Published on: 13 hours ago