Tag: politics

Blowhards

How many blowhards talk too loud
as they spout long-winded platitudes
meanwhile dissolving, like a cloud,
depleting themselves with attitudes?
They heed not the passing terrain
as they spend their ephemeral lives
spouting gusts, gales, and spittle rain
to topple temples and shake bee hives.
They’ve much flative outrage to vent
as their stormfronts tumble overhead,
the thunderheads soon having spent
their fury unto silence, instead.
TV broadcasts them far and wide,
their squall line of faces puffing up
with outrage from which none can hide
as tornadoes spin in the teacup.
Sirens wail, the vortices spin,
and the National Guard is deployed
while we cower in shelters when
the blowhards battle, and are destroyed.
Then the radar clears, and the map,
as red pixel patches drift and fade,
but I can hear the thunderclap
of yet another blowhard’s tirade…

Arsonists

There are too many peoples
willing to set fast fires
to their homes, to their steeples,
just so the needless pyres
will bloom with cinder and smoke
in a nearby window;
just so their neighbors will choke
when contrary winds blow;
too many peoples of spite
on both sides of the aisle
would rather argue and fight
than do what is worthwhile;

arsonists cannot abide
the act of compromise,
that holy pact where each side
gives and takes so both rise
above the fires of the past,
building anew in truth
so the neighborhoods may last
in peace, our hearts fireproof;
hatred is when a heart burns
beyond its picket fence,
beyond its kindling concerns,
beyond all commonsense.

More Rhymes

Lucubrations

If science is still a candle

in the dark

then we must get a firm handle

on Truth’s spark

and grow it into a campfire

for the woods,

to reveal our world and retire

our dark hoods.

But politics are sunglasses

worn at night,

dimming the Truth as it passes

near the light

and veiling our eyes with shadows—

do not shade

your sight with how a mad-fad goes

(they all fade).

Beyond the tribal lenses

we all wear

we could gain better senses

for what’s there

if we could only hold the light

close and fast

we would nevermore fear that night

of Man’s past.

Rotgut

The rust-banded barrels

and rust-colored spiders,

rust-bespeckled heralds

with cocooned miters.

Rotgut whiskey, bellied

with gut-rotting venom,

insect innards jellied

and melting within them.

A Dead Horse

It is a dead pack-horse

for your grievances, your grudges,

beaten without remorse,

yet still it lays, never budges

beneath that scornful weight

encumbering its frayed saddle

as you spite its sad state,

not sparing yourself the paddle.

A Difference Of Character

Some wear their petty little griefs

as if they are acclaimed war scars,

listing long their aggrieved beliefs

as if Purple Hearts, or Gold Stars,

while others, with true wounds to bear,

hide them beneath thick, modest sleeves,

afraid others will glimpse and stare

at what never fades; never leaves.

Shame

A thousand tweets of lunacy

and, thus, thousands of boots trammeling

the Constitution.

The Confederacy rises again,

but this time in the halls of the Capitol,

its head ordained by the

small thumbs of the president

even as he disavows the chaos

with his wolfish smirk.

“Where we go one, we go all,”

the sheep say,

a flock whose fanged shepherd

delights in its herd mentality, its

stampede toward the cliff of

Disunion,

crashing into the turbulent sea,

their white fleece like the

choppy froth

of a tempest temper tantrum,

spiraling down as a whirlpool

into the depths of wreckage and ruin

and the trench of Ignorance.

Such a flock!

Blinded not by

tear gas

or rubber bullets

or blinking police lights,

but by the faith in a wolf;

blindfolded by his

slobbering tongue,

anointed by his

sly licks of faux-love

which rallies them into the frenzied state

of a

third-world country’s revolt.

And what of his enablers?

What of the cowboys that let the skin-changer

run free among the flock?

What of those that encouraged him

to eat the hobbled lambs

with his eager jaws?

They are

midwives to Madness

flinching at the end-of-term delivery

as if

they have no blood and piss and shit

on their hands,

disavowing all after

helping bring into this world

l’enfant terrible

and the horrific caesarean afterbirth

of a ruptured nation.

Encoiled

Split apart, right down the middle,
between inertia and action,
confused as if by a riddle
and divided like a fraction,
you speak to me with a forked tongue
of your loyalties and the law,
but this is not what truly stung—
it was how you unhinged your jaw
to consume the totalities
and digest the contradictions,
the post-modern modalities
like coils fattened on such fictions,
all the while engulfing your tail
so as to not lose track of it,
the recursive act soon to fail
as you eat yourself, bit by bit.

The Proud Boys

Hipster brigade

with the sideburn fade.

NRA lite

joking/not joking alt Right,

passive-aggressive simps

pretending to be chauvinistic chimps,

throwing poo

into the milieu

for a troll-lol-lol —

each a petty asshole.

Gavin McInnis, the founder,

likes a big rear-pounder,

taking a dildo up the downside

of his brown-slide,

on live tv

to prove he

is a man ’s man,

a bro-stan

of Ayn Rand,

conflating his own hand

with gov overreach

up the breech.

And by this token

and that token

and that token

they think the Woken

are thus broken,

but useful idiots

are also vidiots —

technicolor fools

over which the new rules

of tribalism

and bible schism

are isms themselves,

sprawling across untidy shelves

and crowned in tinfoil hats,

contentious with so many @s.

Guns, god, and glory,

or so goes the story

they tell themselves at night

in their monitor light,

but the keyboard alt-right-shift

and the libertarian thrift

only go so far,

like a shooting star,

and so they tweet and greet,

meet down the street

in Cabela ’s gear

like a Camo steer,

pretend-soldier boys

with compensating toys,

assault rifles held tight

in case there is a fight

from their instigating,

screaming, “Race-baiting! ”

as they take aim

like that movie by the name,

“Falling Down ”,

but looking like a clown.

No, mother is not proud

of sons overly loud

as they grandstand

in their KKK-Pop boy band.

Real men don ’t whine

at their own punchline,

and pwning themselves just so

no one else can have a go

is like a skit full of snark

from the creators of South Park.

And this “jk ” defense

doesn ’t make any sense.

They are wired

and, some, Trump-inspired,

meming meaning into their days

in a Red Bull-and-bullshit haze,

playing at PR on youtube,

five rubles a newb,

in the comments section

with little self-reflection

while badmouthing Joe

on his Rogaine show

for doing his own thing

because they are Alex Jonesing

while hunkering down

and bunkering down

in a cyber stronghold —

for fuck ’s sake, their shit ’s getting old

The Modern Oz

The modern Tin Man is fueled by

snake oil,

having given away freely his

heart

for an Amazon discount

and a podcast peacemaker of

conspiracy theories.

The Scarecrow has lost his brain

in a broken trade deal,

having pawned it off to pay for

tariffs

while he stuffs the breadbasket with

soybeans,

laying down,

at long last, beneath his

thresher

to return to a simpler time.

The Cowardly Lion roars

with hashtags on Twitter,

Instagramming a fierce photo

while, between posts, shuddering

in the dark of his

lock-down apartment.

The Wizard sits on a

golden toilet

behind the puppeteer curtain,

vociferating loudly

like an orange talking head

to distract from the sounds he makes as he

drops another turd in the swampy toilet bowl,

refusing to flush it.

Dorothy, meanwhile, has been picking fights

with the little people,

accusing them of being

illegal immigrants

while she ignores the tornado of

historical currents

that had brought her to this golden city

upon a hill.

And the

Wicked Witch of the West

sips Tea Party tea,

caterwauling as her flying monkeys busily

troll online,

copy/pasting disinformation for

a ruble a post.

And poor Toto is nothing but

roadkill

splattered along the Yellow Brick Road.

(Non bene pro Toto libertas venditur auro).

Drain The Swamp

Drain the swamp! But first, drop your drawers
and throw yourself down on all fours.
Let’s look with a clinical glance
at what you have in your pants.
STI’s galore, right in the crotch,
and a tv remote, with which you watch
Fox News, Hannity, Carlson, Dobbs,
lots of others for whom such jobs
hinge on flattering a bog creature
wet to the undies, no past teacher
being able to potty train you
or your mouth, spewing doodoo
whenever you feel wronged (by the truth)
and lying so fast that no gumshoe sleuth
can trek through the torrential morass
that landslides out of your blustering ass;
so much bullshit in your dirty diaper
that you could be the Pied Piper
of sewer rats, the trail left behind
as you pass like a cess swamp, of a kind.
Just look at the rubbish in your wake,
for it is more than most pants can take:
OAN bullet points, rubles, a puppeteer’s hand
reaching all the way from KGB land,
some Deutsche Bank notes, and IOU’s
that you have written for your dues,
and here is a National Enquirer rag
with a QAnon flyer, Confederate flag,
and now a replica of Mt. Rushmore
featuring your face—you cretinous boor.
“Drain the swamp!” you shout aloud
to your cultist, sycophantic crowd,
but if they could only see what’s under
your diapered orangutan blunder—
looks like a small mushroom stem
in the swamp of “us vs them”.

Ad Hominem Omnium

They attack your tact
to attack the truth.
They stab you in the back
to undercut the proof.
They tar and feather
to demean the science.
They rally together
in stubborn defiance.
Tribal to the core
as their voices heighten,
crowding your front door
as the nooses tighten.
Clannish, deaf, beastly, blind,
they burn all labs and books,
lobotomize the mind
with sneering, snaring hooks.
Alexandria burned
and humanity lost
much of what it had learned,
because such is the cost—
an attack on the Truth
is an attack on us all,
and on themselves, forsooth:
part and parcel the Fall.