a song, another song, and another

Yesterday was April 5th and I found myself back out protesting.

I have grown weary of my own need to pull out the yarn of the past, as I mentioned last time. Or rather I suppose the point of the newsletter is to do what I want. I don’t want to be tiresome, and I am tired of myself sometimes, too.

There is some news or rather something I would like to share that I’ve been sitting on for some time now. I feel protective of it and also in some sort of constant bargain where I will trade off some of the choices I’ve been avoiding to try and, I don’t know, do something better about it. This is all very vague because I continue to bargain with figuring out how to imbue my news with the most power! Which is a fool’s errand and who cares. And if I think about GETTING the news, and I think about each time I have engaged with this project which has involved happy tears and some continued muscle build of work in the world, I know that I will always and still have that.

Sorry, by the way. What a thing to read.

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I am still making my way through a thick biography of Pablo Neruda. Currently I’m at the point in time where Neruda has been living as a poet diplomat (Christ, what a world) in Spain as Franco’s fascism crushed down into the 1940’s. He had not left Spain when his friend Garcia Lorca was shot in Granada amidst the rest of the civilians.

There is of course a bunch of fucked up shit to learn about Neruda that I suppose shouldn’t be surprising - likely a rapist, certainly a shitty husband and father, clearly a poet’s self-absorbed treatment of women - but I went to find out more about him because of what I know of Neruda and Chile. Or rather I wanted to remember about poets that continue on through what has been a dubious moral arc through history. It’s not a very kind one. You don’t have a choice to live through it, so why not write? Neruda watched fascism descend once, then twice. These things have happened as they are happening now, and I want to know how people lived and died. To his credit, he managed to use the powers of Chile’s government to haul 2000 refugees across the Panama Canal to resettle. The book seems to avoid all traces of irony about this, but I noticed it. We’re still thirty years out from Pinochet.

The book posits the living through marches and murders pushed what had been a perhaps always-there political and observational poet into some identity of a “people’s poet”, and does point out the irony in this, from Neruda’s middle-class upbringing and ability to live off his family and connections, “suffer” through diplomatic posts across Asia and Europe.

I would not want to be a poet who does not take in marches or horrors or neighbors or the endless waves of cruelty. Make no mistake: we’re pretty good at spotting cruelty. There is no logic to the people who make awful ads on television telling immigrants they’ll be hunted down, who starve the elderly and children, who use trans and queer people as bait for hate, who are in fact rapists no one should be in any small space with. But whatever writer I am or am not, I still know there is a lot in watching what I do out in the world. Today I am fairly very exhausted because I turned back then rode over to a trash pickup in my neighborhood, packed with people spreading out over Bridgeport towards Ducktown. We finished and sat out on the chilly Maria’s patio and I caught up on the monitoring of the river, and know your rights, and people who fished, and who lived where. My friend Scrabblor DJ’d later and we sat and shot the shit. Earlier in the day, the czar of the Buddy System, our Bridgeport emissary and beer baron, Edmar was camped out on the side of Jackson with his trusty karaoke machine.

Edmar spotted on the street at the protest with his karaoke machine singing lol I texted him.

Thats how I first met him in 2002. 

If they are not trying to kill us, they certainly don’t care that they’re going to. Many of them do want to kill us. But we have been here, we will keep being here, we are now just a big and brash country who is going to have to fight the noose of our hubris and recognize we are just another in the line of humans making their way against cruelty, even when it wins. It has won, right now. It does not win in every single moment.

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Notes on the Hands Off Protest, April 5th, 2025. Chicago, IL.

Three protestors on the 62 bus, a sign, someone carrying a drum. The abrupt stop of buses down Dearborn and the hustle up the street. Lady Liberty riding a scooter Northbound in the protected bike lane. The magnetic collection of bodies in front of the Thompson Center, more and more to fill Clark between Washington and Randolph. Many more middle-aged and elder white cis women than I have maybe ever seen at a protest. Puffer coats and the stubborn presence of pink pussy hats. An 80 year old standing in the waiting crush in front of me, a foot shorter, waving a red hand clapper in the chants. My body trying to give her space and block the young person wrapped in a kufiyyeh who keeps pushing their backpack into me, but at least not into her head. Signs. Many, many signs. Clever slogans sidewalk to sidewalk above all our hands. My instinct to be wary of this, the transmission of the need to be internet pithy into the world. My other instinct to stop being like that, and at least think people are THINKING. People are making. Many women taking selfies, any women taking photos of signs. Talk of Metra trains inbound, full of people. He’s a Nazi, he’s always been a Nazi, his grandmother was a Nazi, his grandfather was KKK. Lots of signs playing on DOGE, on Hitler, on impotence, on orange. Memes in the air. Speeches no one can hear. Are we moving? We are waiting. You will know when we are moving. Strollers, a corgi dog, people along the side of the route screaming and taking photos and cheering. So many people taking photos. So many videos. So much for safety protocols. What’s that scary black vehicle? Tourists and young men in business suits staring. A man in a Canada jersey pitching elbows up, murmuring Elbows up, Elbows up. The voices of older woman screaming their answer to my, STAND UP! HANDS OFF! FIGHT BACK FIGHT BACK! Viva viva Palestina. Hands off our bodies. Hands off Abortion. SEIU pouring from their school buses. Nurses against Fascism. Grandmothers against Fascism. Marines against Fascism. Stop killing Veterans. Free Mahmoud. Free Rumeysa. Blue and yellow Ukrainian flag draped groups. Blue and pink and white trans pride flag draped groups. Marchers in wheelchairs, with canes, with walkers. A child banging on a bucket drum. Teenagers banging on bucket drums. Teenagers. Toddlers. Mennonites in knit cap. Hands off science, hands off healthcare, hands off teachers, hands off Medicare, hands off Social Security. DSA Group Photos, the CTU, men in safety vests from the Chicago Federation of Labor. How big do you think it is? Bored and not many cops on the corners on their bikes. The almost too on the nose screaming towards the empty Board of Trade. Edmar singing There Is A Light That Never Goes Out into his karaoke machine, but the lyrics changed to the death of fascists. The spread onto State Street. Old chants from the past that don’t catch on. What’s he saying? Banks got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out. Oh, that’s true. My 75 year old father next to me, just off on the chant beat by a moment, hey hey, ho ho. We used to fight about all of it, he used to have a photo of himself with Bush Sr. White women screaming FUCK TRUMP at the end of the march. The march that continues down 18 city blocks as I walk back towards the train. The train cars taking on people and their signs. A feeling I know is not hope, but maybe some shaky hands in the dark of where we are being cornered, from people I don’t know and would not have known, but here we are anyway. Not a single perfect one of us. Any small step that could mean mercy, resistance, any insistence to stay alive, or cry out as the dark keeps descending.

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Neruda, from Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca

Over everything at night,
at night there are many stars,
all within a river
like a ribbon beside the windows
of houses filled with poor people.

Someone they know has died,
maybe they’ve lost their jobs in the offices,
in the hospitals, in the elevators, in the mines;
they endure their purpose stubbornly, wounded,
and there’s purpose and weeping everywhere

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Take care out there, and thanks for being here. If you haven’t ever or haven’t been to a march or protest, and one seems like it could use your feet and name, I recommend it. And read some poetry. Tis the month.