Survival Report #2 Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday morning, March 1,2013; Wednesday morning, March 13,2019 at 11: 52 a.m.

- for my wife Kim Ryan

" ‘No one governs innocently'... all politics makes use of the police, who officially flaunt their contempt for the individual and who love violence for its own sake.The thing that goes by the name of political necessity is in part the brutality of the police."
- Simone deBeauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

"It is the business of the poet
‘To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.' "
- George Oppen, "The Building of the Skyscraper"

I understand the necessity of speaking out,
the necessity of suffering "the things of [this] world"—
but the violent traumas, the serious injuries, the financial losses
are becoming too much.Far too much—
I am horrified by what is happening to us.
My wife works vigilantly so we might sleep in our beds,
but when will she get a good night's rest?
No one asks about her— neither friend nor family,
and in one poem you ask, "We are brothers, we are brothers? "
According to my experience, I can report we truly are not.