Arise, go forth from this place, for the Lord
is destroying the city
It is election night and I don’t want to
go to sleep without knowing if my city
is being destroyed.
If all of my friends behind all the
red and blue borders are becoming
pillars of salt because they couldn’t
help but look back. I’d like to take
more responsibility but I cast my Lot
weeks ago. I’d like to tell you
I know how this happened but
I dropped out of electoral college
and now I just look wistfully
at the electoral collages on the TV. It is
election night and I think the chief fornicator
just excused himself from the process.
I’m having a couple of angels over
for breakfast to discuss. The ancient
wisdom says one should get out of Dodge.
The ancient wisdom says there are
fewer people on our side than we thought.
The ancient wisdom says
we should take Canada more seriously.
The appeal of a small city, the healthcare
on every corner, the human beings in charge.
I may come off like a comedian, but
I’m just paraphrasing the oldest book we’ve got.
I’m just telling it like it was. I’m just exhausted
from having to talk about this at all.
I may go to sleep, anyway, before
all the buildings go away.
Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 23 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.
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