Emotional Exhaustion

My country is burning, and instead of unifying leadership, we have a malintentioned cretin in the White House, gleefully throwing accelerant on the flames. Shocking murders at the hands of the police and of white racists are everyday things.

At the same time, we are battling a deadly pandemic, to which our national response has been leaderless and pathetic. We have four percent of the world's population, and thirty percent of its COVID-19 infections. African Americans die at twice the rate of the general population due to systemic inequalities.

Armed right-wing thugs bring weapons of war into statehouses.

Climate change is putting us all increasingly at risk.

Against such a backdrop, I hate to mention that someone in the United States has spent twenty of the last twenty-four hours harvesting 426 of my poems. I can only assume that he or she is a pirate, not a poetry lover, and plans to publish an unauthorized collection of my work. I have not authorized ANY such collection. Please don't buy it. Let me know (exolinguist at gmail dot com) if you see it.

Now I can go back to just being emotionally exhausted.


© 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.