Month: November 2016

 (after Maya Angelou)

I’m a crock, a grabber, a disease
that proves a feces can be president!
I led the bastards on!
I’m a philistine! I leave dried cheetos
Of my sojourn here
gold plated on the planet floor.
You’d sounded alarms of my hateful spew;
you lost in the gloom of ignorance and craziness.
Sad.

And today, I cry out to you, clearly, forcefully,
in words that are just beautiful, the best words!
Come, you may stand upon my orange
face and scream your distant nightmares,
But seek no haven in my looming shadow.
I will give you no hiding place up here.
I, created only a little lower than
The devils, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have sat too long
on my throne of golden greed.
My mouth spills words
that mean business.
(But also mean nothing)

I cry out to you today: you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.
I will need to find you later
and lock you up.
Across the wall of the world,
a great big beautiful wall.

Come, be hypnotized by my nonsense!
Each of you, a bordered country,
Gullible  and, if white, made proud,
I thrust perpetually; you’re besieged!
I snuggle with my profit,
leave collars of waste upon
the shore, loogies of debris upon women’s breasts.
Yet today I call you my subjects,
If you will study reason no more. Come,
Clad in Trump ties and Ivanka’s boots, and I will
perpetuate the wrongs
My father did to me when I was young.
My lips were pouting roses, my side part hair
a prototype for Richie Rich. His cruelty
is to blame.

And you! Your cynicism is a bloody sear across your
Brow and you thought you knew
but you know nothing: all the polls were wrong.
The fat lady sang and sings on.
There is a base desire to respond to
at every point around the clock:
a steak, a chick, a power grab, my cock.
So to the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher…

I don’t hear you.

I don’t see you.

Are you even saying anything?
Your protests are like the squeaking of a bee.
or a dangblasted mosquito at Mar el Lago.
I’ll speak to the media today. Come to me, here up in the tower.
Plant yourself beside the restaurant.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, is an immigrant.

Except me – I changed my name.
You… you Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, get behind your walls.
We’re making pipelines. Oh wait,
I’m not even in charge yet.
Here’s to the employment of
Other seekers — desperate for gain,
Starving for gold, who will compromise everything
to be in my cabinet.

You, the Turk, the Arab –­ no –
the Swede, the German,  – OK ­–
the Eskimo –nope­– the Scot – OK
but not the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
I perpetuate.

Here, humble yourselves before me.
I am that fake xmas tree planted by the River of White Chocolate,
Which is made to be thrown up.
I, the schlock, I the grabber, I the disease
I am yours  now, suckers– your votes meant nothing.
Lift up your faces, see my fierce greed
For this wretched mourning yawning before you.
All of history’s wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, and I
will make you live it again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking into noxious gasses for you.
Give birth again
whether you want to or not.
Women, children, men,
Take me into the palms of your hands,
Mold me into the shape of your most
Private need. Aww yeah. Sculpt me into
The image of your most noxious dread.
Lift up your hearts

for the dagger.
Each new hour holds new chances
For me to swindle you.
Do not be wedded forever –
I’m thrice-married!, not yoked eternally
To older bitches!

The horizon shrinks backward,
Offering me space to get kickbacks
from building “infrastructure”
in flyover country.
Here, on this repulsive day
You may have the courage
To get up and look out the window
at your ruined  country.

I am Midas. You’re all mendicants.

I’m a macho mastodon.

Here, on this repulsive day
You may with nausea get up to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, into your pitiful country
And say simply

Very simply:

No hope –

just mourning.

10/26/16

MY reason aches, and a drowsy horror pains
My sense, as though of a billionaire’s roofies I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull quaaludes to my brains
One minute past, and Trump-wards we have sunk:
‘Tis not through pity for thy sorry lot,                     5
But being too crappy in thine crappiness,
That thou, plastic-wingèd mascot of the apocalypse,
In some discordant plot
Of backroom smoke, and shadows numberless,
shrieks of bummer and full-blown dictatorships.            10

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
stewed a long age on the warming earth,
Tasting of Monica and the country-green,
Dancing the macarena like some partial birth!
O for a cleansing of the racist South!            15
Full of the fake, the ignorant hypocrites,
With beaded slogans twinkling at caps’ brims,
And their slur-stainèd mouths;
I want to slink, and leave the world unseen,
And fade away, misanthropic, into the future dim:            20

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the evil hast never known,
The pussy-grabs, the emails, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other boast;
Where drone-bombs shake a few, sad, last kids,            25
Where Jill Stein grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
From all the radiation on her phone.
Oh, leaden eyes and eyelids!
Melania cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
She’s sold her soul and there is no to-morrow.            30

Away! away! or I will fly from thee,
Not charioted by Mike Pence and his tards,
But on the gormless wings of Poesy,
Though my dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,            35
And haply Queen Hill will take her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry-eyed cronies.
Here there are no rights,
Save what our old constitution has with its amendments abused
by gun-toting goons and religious phonies.            40

I cannot see Paul Ryan and his giant ears,
Nor what soft scrota hang inside his pants,
There, in embalmèd darkness, musky sweet
Wherewith unreasonable endless cant
The cretins, the crackers, and the macho go wild;            45
Whitely supreme (would be), grand and elephantine;
Teen miss universes cover’d up in fear;
Of a superannuated child,
Campaigning in gross prose, full of juicy lies,
He haunts the stage like Lurch on autumn eves.            50

Darkly I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Said to him, oh baby, in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it wise to die,            55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such idiocy!
Still wouldst thou squawk, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high per diem become a sod.            60

Thou wast born for this crap, jingoist Bird!
No hungry Sarah Palins tread thee down;
The screech I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path            65
Through the sad heart of Hillary, when, sick for power,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic pipelines, opening on the tower
That Trump built, in gentrified cities forlorn.            70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to Bernie Sanders!
Adieu! the fancy always cheat so well
As Trump is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! his tiny orange hands            75
Roving near pudendas, over the frozen teen,
And up her little hill-sides; and now they’re buried deep
In the national psyche:
Was it a nightmare, or a waking dream?
Soon is the election:—do I wake or sleep?            80