Love Poem: Regressive Progress
Gerald Dillenbeck Avatar
Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Regressive Progress

In Shaker Heights, Ohio,
founding fathers co-invested in:

Change doesn't happen
without planning

This, despite
unstraight
unwhite
unmale volatile experiences
feeling sometimes victimized
and sometimes blessed
by unexpected weather transitions,
despite feeling like vulnerable chameleons
on a highly complex day,
despite feeble farming
in narrowing spaces
between floods and famine,

Despite more often feeling:
Plans were made to be changed,

A euphemism for:
Your plans are disempowered
to become downsized,
disinvited,
excised.

Planning change
feels as privileged as LeftBrain dominance
which need not pause to listen
and remember
more fear-inducing personal experiences
of chronic trauma

Predative change predicting health
and wealth losses,
wild absence of planned control
like HIV
and COVID-19,
global pandemics
and climate change
erasing EarthTribe's
presumed polyculturally healthy
future symbiotic ego/eco-systems.

If sinister changes,
including global pandemics,
feel suspiciously planned to you
then please rediscover
your LeftBrain anxious conspiracy theories
as a RightBrain felt weakness
against integrity

ReRooted in Straight-White-Male
incorporated executive 
academic 
judiciously righteous privilege
to have disproportionate learning resources
to research,
and plan more exclusive anthrosupreme progress
in urbane families
and professional work
and expert economic
and entitled political
correct ego-formation history

More successful
than chronic disenfranchisement,
monocultural marginalization,
psychological depression,
feminist political repression,
economic suppression,
win/lose competitive corporate colonizing
oppression
left v right compression--
all tragic unprogressive forms,
not therapeutic changing flows,
of mundane traumatic pathology.

Change
for LeftBrain dominant speakers,
does not always sound like 
Progress
to RightBrain prominent listeners.

Ambiguity about personal capacity
to empower therapeutic change
can also be heard
when I "deserve":

to stay home
(paid or unpaid?)
when I'm sick

to give voice
(listened to or ignored?)
to my transparent truth

to be housed,
institutionalized,
hospitalized,
incorporated,
resourced,
employed by patriarchal capitalists,
health cared for,
loved for who I could become
with explicit contractual conditions
for rewarded positive
(more than punished negative)
regard.

If we have too seldom deserved
merits
more than demerits
in our own salvation/demonization
invitation/extrication experience,
then we grow quick to notice
"change" comes in positive
and negative future plans

As "progress"
can be progressive cancer
and climates of disruption
more than polyculturally inclusive choice
of love 
and not fear,
of compassion
and not violence

For too many of Those People,
as also for global EarthTrauma
climate change,
what follows Patriarchal-Capitalist plans
for next quarter's progress
is frightening absence
of eco-political integrity,
Business As Planned Usual
increasingly degenerating 
toxic chaos costs.