Thursday September 13th, 5 days before my 32nd birthday, a Southern Gothic Futurist Haiku Slam at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar at 8pm in Charlottesville.
Free to get in, bring $$ for snacks and tea, come to meet your cousins. We are all cousins here.
https://www.facebook.com/events/151790915527339/?ti=as
I am coming to wreck shop. Ford vs Chevy
Bout to get heavy
Literary or literal. Come find out. Firefly. Cville. Be there. Friend or pho. Fo. Foe.
When internet makes
You upset go to the herb
Garden. Eat a leaf
Fresh motherwort leaf
Is bitter and distracting
And helps anxiety
Blocking people you
Don’t agree with is a non
Starter movement plan
If you don’t know what
I know I won’t show patience
Only cold disdain
Now how does that work
How does anyone change and
How is this healthy
If someone makes a
Mistake send them swiftly to
The gulag. No hope.
America has
Always been like this y’all this
Isn’t a trump thing
Do we condemn thought
Crimes, do we hold a rigid
Line, do we take time
If you marched with the
Nazis yesterday, you can
Still renounce and heal
I worry about
Hard lines that make it harder
To change hurting minds
For fucks sake we were
All tiny babies once and
Have been damaged so.
How can we believe
In change but not believe these
People can change too
How do we fight hate
Fueled by hate ourselves and not
Lose what we fought for
Hey y’all
If you saw the person get killed today, or witnessed violence, or suffered violence, chances are high you have been traumatized.
You may not make the best choices in this state. You may need to do your self care. You may need to step back.
Damage from this sort of shit is real but it doesn’t have to totally rule you. Your mental health is important. Slow down to take care.
If you feel totally frantic, urgent, adamant, you may really be the one who needs a time out for self care. Ask for help if you need it.
mokarnage.com/2017/07/22/emotional-trauma-and-stress-self-care/
Friday night, looking at my Facebook feed I was seeing a lot from friends about the white supremacists rally in nearby Charlottesville. And I had an really terrible foreboding feeling well up in my stomach. My gut said no, no one should go. I posted on Facebook kind of warning people, that was how strong the intuition was. I knew I wasn’t going to really stop anyone from going but I felt the urge to try.
Saturday morning I felt conflicted. If this is a major civil rights issue of our era, a pinnacle moment, a line in the sand, I wanted to be there. I did not want to avoid a protest or be silent in the face of hatred. There were a ton of people I love and respect planning on attending. I want my kids to live in a better world, and I want to be proud of the legacy I leave them. Several different religious and political groups I know and respect were making a presence. And hearing more about the tiki torch wielding Nazis from Friday night at UVA, and their intentional use of that fear inducing imagery was really hard. I had a friend message me upset that I was discouraging folks from attending. I felt a lot of pressure to show up. So we made a last minute decision and I threw my medic bag together and we took the baby to his grandma’s house.
We parked strategically away from the sites of protest once in Charlottesville and walked in. I wanted to find the place where some of my friends were meeting in a church. I had been told that earlier that morning things were calm there. Not knowing Charlottesville well we ended up where the white supremacists were gathered being confronted by counter protesters in Emancipation park. I immediately wanted to burst into tears.
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Mo Karnage 
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