Windy Blackout Days

By Dick Eiden

Dick is a writer, attorney, and political activist living in Vista, California. He is the author of Paying the Rent, an autobiograpical account of anti -war and civil rights activism in the 1960’s and beyond. The book is available on Amazon.

​Windy Blackout Days

​I was driving slowly when it blew into the intersection 
like a tumbleweed, a white plastic shopping bag filled with air 
blowing through traffic like a running back dodging Teslas 
and trucks, tumbling headlong toward some end zone
down the street where the howling was headed.
 
Such a thing could cause chaos & conflict among us, afraid,
late, and mad at dead traffic lights flashing red, four-way stops
revealing drivers who wait their turn and some who don’t 
- so easy, they are, to anger and incite.
 
Do-gooders & Keystone Cops bumble to the scene 
blowing whistles and directing traffic as maskless drivers 
power past, screaming where to go and what to do with it.
 
Rocks & dead branches were turned up this year, the fertile 
mulch of murder in Minneapolis, Louisville, Kenosha, the smell 
of lies - It doesn’t take much to piss people off these days. 
 
They say scoundrels thrive in chaos and relish opportunity in 
flames of arson, iron grills pried from walls and broken windows, 
while they sell death and hoard money in foreign accounts, get tests, 
vaccines and Doctor Bone Spurs letters when they need them and 
have lunch at the club with business politician friends from college, 
not the rowdy thugs they use to storm the statehouse. 

December 3, 2020