It’s the eve of the election
I’m at home and there’s a fire in the hearth
I live where we all wind up eventually—
Taking the road north out of Los Angeles
Drive forever then turn right
Hide out in the mountains
Of northern California and wait for the apocalypse
The Sierras Nevadas have a politics
All its own—you can’t stay
True to anyone one cause here
Sooner or later there’s a mountain lion
Eating your cat or a deer on your fender
And you forget you’re a pacifist
You grow a garden and give half to your gun totting neighbor
Or you give some 14 year old a drive to Planned Parenthood
90 miles and 5 churches away
It’s the eve of the election
But I voted weeks ago
Stuck a few hopes and misses
in the mail and two stamps this time
and I prayed my paranoid tendencies
Didn’t over take me
Did it reach the office?
Did they throw it in the trash?
I gave up voting in person
When they went to the machines
Without a trace of paper
Without a way to know
Without a way to not be cynical and stolen
So I mail in the lesser of two evils
Under cover of sleep and dream
And I wait for things to turn out like me
But they never do
You don’t want me to vote for you
You’ll lose every time
I’ve never had to stand in one of those
Breadlines for voting
of desperation
Of defiance
I’ve never voted on a Sunday after church
No one ever had to drive me to the polls
I do my part with the elderly though
Keep my grandmother off of Fox News
My world doesn’t look like Florida
I’m not Ohio or Colorado
I’m from the touch down
Make the check payable to
Golden coin state of California
Where we usually live and let live
Where we pass laws about
Just about everything and we
Complain mightily about it
But hey with all these people
We still have cleaner air than Texas
We are still one of the top ten economies
Of the world right? Right?
I almost feel sorry for my neighbors
Here in God’s country—
This state will never go Red.
When did Republicans go Red?
Wasn’t red a communist color?
But we don’t know what that word means anyways
I want to feel something about the election
I want it to be more than a Facebook cartoon
I want it to be about my America—
The one without pasty old white men in my uterus
The one that doesn’t care about race
The one that doesn’t believe its own myths
The America I know Is totally gay
The America I know it has lesbian mothers
The America I know
Has Mexican Grandfathers who make dinner
Shirtless in their boxers and dress shoes
It has Grandmothers from the Bronx who
Teach you how to play cards and swear like sailors
It has Mexican husbands that grew up on KROQ and Morrissey
It has uncles who are illegal
It has white aunts with student loans bigger than houses
My America doesn’t have southern BBQ or Iowa corn or Idaho potatoes
I have a cell phone and a bad attitude and no TV
No one polled me in this election
Do I even have a demographic?
What do you call a Mexican woman from Los Angeles
hiding out in a forest with her family
the over educated product of lesbian mothers
and a dad that saw too much of the sixties
with two kids a dog and debt?
What am I America?
Where am I on your red and blue map?
On election eve.
I visualize that mail-in ballot
And all the good propositions passing
And all the bad ones going by the way side
And all the evil people disappearing
And all the good people surviving
Amen Amen Amen
