Six Immigrant Controversies

1.
After dinner we are all furiously knowing something about something.
We are at Michelle's with Ron.

Chris and I do most of the talking,
when we talk about politics, as we are tonight

his eyes get shiny and he interrupts me a lot. I don't mind it
though, and I'm not just saying that.

2.
He says I am espousing Marxist ideas, I disagree but then try to be diplomatic
by admitting it is possible that I am wrong in what I know to be Marxism.

Anything is possible. And this possibility doesn't necessarily
fall into unlikely.

3.
He says we have lost the battle and it is no longer possible for the People
to control their own destiny.

He says that a lack of education among the People, and a surplus of buying power in the corporate sector, have left us with an unsalvageable nation.

He says that our rights only become less certain, and our future more sterile.

He says all of this with a coolness that seems to say: "None of this is a great shock, it's obvious, and certainly inevitable.

At this, my heart twists.
Aches.

4.
Sometimes, when I tell someone with Faith,
that I have none,

that I believe we will rot in the ground, and that the universe
will forget us almost immediately after our bodies betray us,

I can see their heart reach for me. They say things like:
"How can you think that?
"What do you have to live for?
"How do you go on?
I never give these questions much thought.

5.
and so I blink, hopelessly,
at my love.

"How can he think that?
"How does he go on?
"What does he have to live for?

In the moment my heart is twisting and the ache is acute. But later
the pain moves on (as it always does in love, where nothing can remain fenced)

and I am both chilled and amused that Chris has inadvertently
revealed himself to be the purer atheist between us,

and he has, possibly inadvertently as well, forced me to examine
my own version of Faith.

My most virginal Faith in the People to wish one another the most meaningful
and fulfilled life possible,

through living individual lives
that strive to be benign above all else.

My Faith in the People to rise up when they should, and recede when they are able.

Is this my religion? Is it my own version
of the phantom surrogate alpha-dog I had assumed I had outgrown?

6.
No matter, I know there are no answers
to these kinds of questions.

Still, I am somehow slightly different after this post-dinner conversation on a friend's couch. My line of sight has been disrupted.

These contradicting abstractions, these battles
of assumption, they are out there now. There is no taking them back.