Venus

Standing and looking out either direction, north or south, from where I live and sit it’s safe up here. Same looking east or west as I face south; up too, vertical, except as drones buzz round. Doesn’t feel so, though, arriving home from Pensacola last evening, the gates were down, WTFO, not that gates are security but the feel. The sometime sunset security guard doesn’t do it, the feel.

What’s going on? The Kaiser-Frazer 

dealership is gone, pulled down, the old art deco building in Little Dothan, with curved corners and round window, I’m becoming the past. The Hudson dealership on W. 6th Street is long gone, 

I can’t even tell where it was anymore, and the Crosley store 

same vicinity. Now the Nash store, gone, the building pulled down, leaving BayMed crossing MLK you wait till traffic clears both directions then straight across heading west on 6th Street past Walgreens and down the grade to the end at Hamilton Avenue, there’s the building where I went to see the homeliest new American car in Detroit history, the 1949 Nash Airflyte, 

the so-called “bathtub Nash.” Even for decades after, part of the old Nash script showed where paint had flaked off on the front over the showroom, as gone as yesterday. The pointy end has been cut off the Oldsmobile showroom, 

a palm tree or something planted there and the building now in other use. But now home to old refrigerators, the Studebaker dealership

building is doomed, its glass point long broken out and boarded over, I’m feeling boarded over too, what’s going on?

And what happened to this land is my land this land is your land from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters, what’s happening, war on California and by God federal troops will be sent in if necessary to quell the sanctuary cities rebellion? I remember the old days and the old ways, and they weren’t best, but the rearview mirror is a damn sight brighter than the way ahead where we have nothing to fear but our own Kristallnacht. 

What have we wrought.

DThos+