01/18/2025
MAGA Maggot!
Part One: Let Not Stones Their Silences Keep.
My country, this of you, when my heart hurts, it’s as if the hurt is another person’s pain.
Puppeteers auction my heart off.
The beat of my blood belongs to someone else.
Sweet land that once pretended to be free,
I have to touch your ground to make sure it’s still there.
But no matter how much I touch, I’m not sure that your ground is still there.
I could hug myself but that offers less solace than the hug of another.
I could laugh or I could cry.
My laugh is too loud.
My tears are too salty.
My laugh hurts my ears.
My tears burn my eyes.
From sea to shining sea, hate is like salt—
you can always add more but you can’t siphon salt out.
Hate is a radioactive with no half life.
A MAGA red wax crayon hides in a pocket of America’s pants.
America’s pants are in the wash along with America’s fluffy, white, towels,
And smooth, white, satin, sheets.
The sheets of the Klansmen.
MAGA red wax marks all of the wash.
Of this disparity, I sing.
But my song seems to spring from outside my throat.
My warble has no with.
The me that’s me isn’t me.
I have no throat but I must swallow.
Dough, dough, there is so much dough.
No more “ray,” no more “me,” no more “fa,”
No more “la,” no more “ti.”
Just dough.
Our song long gone.
The scale is broken; the pans uneven.
Justice not just blindfolded but gagged.
America, my country, not of me.
Puppeteers raid the palace.
Puppeteers pay crypto.
The coin of realm dies in a digital mine.
Could we stuff T Rump’s pockets anymore?
Render unto T Rump that which is T Rump’s.
T Rump owns us all.
God is no longer on our side.
Land where Father died, Land where Mother cried.
That which I see seems closer than it is,
Or much farther away
This ring on my finger bands planets.
Planets, dust in my eye.
I hear a train whistle.
The whistle bounces off “Old Glory.”
That train carts a boxcar of ghosts.
The train carts the ghost of an American hero.
Our American hero moans alone.
Dead soldiers do not fight again.
Land of Pilgrim sighs.
Night mists rise.
Evil does not walk alone.
Voices I know, even my own, sound distorted, small, and meager, as if static stolen from an old time radio.
As if transmitted from somewhere far out in space.
We are now all aliens.
From our nation’s mountain sides.
Puppeteers harvest all of our iron.
“She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes!”
Wrought iron chains hold We the People fast.
I beat against an invisible wall.
The invisible wall cleaves me from everything else.
My fists, as futile as today’s newspapers.
Today is tomorrow’s yesterday.
I should never have sat down to just think.
My thoughts got away from me.
Now I watch as my thoughts savage the headlines.
There are white membrane sacks in the family swill bucket.
Our farmer missed the weekly pick up.
The membrane sacks split open.
Out spill many white worms.
The white worms be fly larvae.
MAGA Maggot!
Part Two: Music no longer beats the heat.
My country, these natives, my Lord, my love.
Your name I once knew.
When the door opens and I see your face,
It feels like I’ve done this before.
But the recollections that crowd the space between my ears feel as if they happened to another.
Another that I only knew briefly as I might remember someone I once sat next to on a train or on an airplane.
America, your rocks, your rills, your trees, your hills!
When I eat, my food has no taste, not even that of dust.
My body is a balloon.
One day, I will float away.
One day, I will pop.
My heart, empty as a drum.
My heart’s thumps echo as if steps in a vast, marble, statuary, hall.
Statues in the hall, those of monsters, demons, and creeps.
Nixon’s “committee to reelect the president.”
“CREEP”
A committee of commies. Posse Comitas.
What once was “weird” is now “the American Way.”
The love I once felt now gone as if a bus had just come.
The bus stop now empty.
No one knows if another bus is coming.
Puppeteers scrubbed the bus schedule off the bus stand.
We are what was.
No more shall tyrants trod upon the heads of We the People, we declared.
We had our founding documents..
And now tyrants do trod.
The dead, lead boots of the tyrants, tread on our hearts.
Our Father and Mother God—where are you?
Our endless, true blue, American sky now ash gray.
Grey as the lips of a co**se.
Our sky, as empty as a dead dog’s yawn.
I chew my cud.
I’m a mechanical cow.
I’m a metronome pretending to eat.
Puppeteers have scrubbed the faces of all clocks.
Nothing can be on time.
I once liked to walk barefoot.
Now each step strikes my heels as if a sharp stone.
The land of the once free, the land of the once brave.
This land is hard on my soul.
We cannot reverse this curse.
If white this skin, our founding, foul, sin was to have bought and sold the other colors.
Puppeteers tell us those markets are best forgotten for the sake of national unity.
Whose unity?
I go home.
Home doesn’t seem like home.
Nothing has changed except maybe for me.
I no longer fit anywhere.
Toil and fear,
Blood and tears—
I once was able to see you in my head,
Even when you were away.
Now my mind’s gone blind.
My head, packed with dank, dark stones.
My country, this of you. Christian, Christ, the Jew.
The cross once revered is now an electric chair.
The wind bears a taint of burnt insulation.
A transformer is ready to blow.
“We are all going to die,” says she.
Prepare the needle.
The injection is lethal.
Ignore We the People death writhing.
Secure the straps tighter.
We’ll stop breathing soon enough.
Trapped in our own bodies.
We will watch ourselves die.
That’s a feature not a malfunction.
The rose I press my nose into,
Is just the picture of an American Beauty.
My nose smells nothing.
Save for the fetid odor of flies birthing,
That odor clings to my nostrils as if noxious paint.
I retch.
MAGA Maggot!
Part Three: America—the Botox, the boondoggle, the bungle.
To the composer of Liberty,
To you, we bow. To you, we curtsey.
After we bow, after we curtsey, we once straightened back up as free people do.
Now we stay crouched.
The bare skin on our backs trembles.
As that flesh waits for the lash of a puppeteer.
No matter what color your skin.
The lash is impartial. The puppeteer’s whip not particulier.
Our nation’s original sin.
Karma is a bitch.
“We do not kneel.”
My Appalachian grandma in a Catholic Church.
She thrust her arm out.
Her arm, her martriachal command.
Our family stood.
Those Catholics on their knees avoided our eyes.
We avoided theirs.
Grandma died too soon.
That which my hands touch.
It’s as if another’s hands were doing the touching.
Whose hands?
Am I a marionette? What are these strings?
Where hide my puppeteers?
In plain sight, Facebook, Insta, X, and Fox.
This shining city now perched on top of unstable rocks.
A new day will never dawn.
I look down.
I see myself sitting.
I am not moving.
I’m not dead yet.
I’m “woke,” but life is a mirror.
I’ve lost my reflection.
I can tug,
I can pull.
I can push.
All to no avail.
The river that separates those of us who’ve gone on to the other side,
Only flows one way.
This is America!
This is the Gulf of Fools.
America, the boondoggle, the Botox, the bungle.
How we felt this land! How weak our hand!
The pledges those above us betray.
I pinch myself hard.
My flesh yields.
My flesh blooms red.
Red for Old Glory!
Blue for this nation’s co**se!
White for the money,
the power,
the privilege!
All for the show.
Three to get ready.
No more numbers.
We don’t get to pass ‘Go.”
Monopoly is more than a game.
The airplane, the skate, and the thimble.
No game piece is a winner.
For the moment, another moment is not coming.
We are now plastic dolls.
Bereft of all pleasure.
Our pain, a puppeteer’s gain.
The pursuit of happiness, now ornamental,
The pursuit of happiness, just another Constitutional clause.
Barbie, Skipper and Ken now rule.
Our beloved, smiling doll Supreme Leaders.
Botox tightened.
Bungle be damned.
Let loose the boondoggle!
The hounds of democracy howl.
I’m smiling so hard.
I’m cracking my cheeks.
Another inch of foundation to keep my cheeks cheery.
Howdy Doody and a barrel of monkeys.
It’s old time, good timey, fun!
Keep watching your screen.
It’s now watching you.
Congress was freedom’s grand experiment.
As Dad says, “t**s on a bull.”
I could flaunt my t**s but nobody’s looking.
The tattoo on my arm.
“Mom” spelled backwards.
The anchor, the eagle, my Stars and Stripes.
Upside down.
In the hands of fraud,
In the clutch of selfish wrong,
the Congress is that of baboons.
The full moon looks smaller than any star.
The sun backs away from the earth.
I back away from my own shadow.
In World Wide Worm wonder, listening,
WWW.lost.
The tree lights, glistening,
The ship of state now listing,
The courts, sausage packed.
I could weep. I can rant.
America’s pants are on backwards.
Plastic tears litter my eye slits.
My grin is a gash.
I watch myself grinning.
I watch the old new old President promising.
Are these eyes still mine?
Puppeteers harvest my organs,
My kidneys, my heart.
No more waste and fraud.
The new Medicaid pays for itself.
The rent is due.
My kids need shoes.
Grandma can be parted out for pay.
I’ll take what you offer.
Nothing is free in a free market.
There is rot in our apple.
Our apple core is mealy.
Our apple seeds, bitter.
Our apple flesh, withered, the color of poop—fit only for flies.
Johnny Appleseed’s tombstone slides into the ground.
Time for a new phone.
Chinese workers deserve time and half too.
Labor is labor.
Capital flows freely across borders. Why can’t We the People flow too?
MAGA Maggot!
Part Four: THE SWORD now sheathed in ignorance. Its hilt, an old, smelly sock.
Sky winds once sang this nation’s praise.
But now the sky winds are dead.
No more air.
I spread these fingers wide, “V” for “Victory.”
A “peace” sign too.
No victory, no peace.
The gap between my fingers once choked with light.
Now light can’t pe*****te the gap.
Light is as much substance as heart.
Heart was once more than just another noun.
I’m “woke”
I have visions.
These visions offer no comfort.
These visions rile up my soul.
These visions are backhoes clawing at my innards.
I’m gluten intolerant.
My soul’s source, a stagnant pond, micro plastic and heavy metal contaminated.
A line of coal dust to snort up my nose.
Poor people’s chop.
The rich boys get Bolivia’s finest.
We get slurry in our streams.
I spy with my little eye, a big balloon of a President.
I go to punch that balloon.
I cannot.
T Rump loped my hands off.
No balloon punching for me.
I once liked to play chess.
Now, even my Queen seems futile.
Black or white?
The pawn that we hide behind our backs,
To determine what side.
We can not find.
We are all pawns.
Puppeteers have stolen all four of our moves.
Forward two to start, forward one, diagonal for the capture, and “en passant” for the other capture.
We are now no more than traffic cones on the chess board.
Our king, corrupt.
Along with the knights, the bishops, and the rooks.
The upper class pieces all move anyway they damn please.
The Supreme Court rules that checkmate is unfair.
To our Supreme Leader, our “Unitary Executive,” our king.
Rules and laws are for chumps.
To the author of Liberty,
Before you, our puppeteers now strut.
We the People once owned, at least,
The smell of hot dogs grilling.
Street meat, peppers, and onions.
Who wants a “glizzy?”
Hey, it’s the Fourth of July!
Now all glizzies are pig pigments.
Out flavorless canvas has no flavor.
America’s bun, decades stale.
In the 1980s, “trickle down.”
The lie that worked as well as a hot dog cart without wheels.
Save for the rich.
The rich got richer.
The poor got poorer.
This year, America’s fireworks will broadcast in black and white.
No more colors for us.
And no more booms.
All our ears loped off.
Strung in a necklace around the neck of T Rump.
These American streets once had names.
Now all names scraped, as is our history.
No things remain.
Maps crumpled.
Maps burned.
We have no way forward.
We cannot look back.
Puppeteers throw out the facts.
The past, an evaporating stammer.
Fort Bragg, the Confederate flag.
The Stars and Bars are back.
Patriotism, for the other side.
I do not belong here.
Lo!
Whoever will be a patient shall no longer be nursed.
The nation’s feeding tube is clogged.
The supporting boughs of America’s liberty tree—splinter as they never have.
My thoughts, alien as microbes.
When I speak, gears spin, my mouth pried open and then shut.
I can hear the squeak of the gears.
These self proclaimed “Patriots,”
These American flag waving traitors,
T Rump’s wind up toys.
We the People, his “thing-a-ma-bobs.”
His “whatcha ma call its.”
His “doo hickey dos.”
I once had hunger.
I once had thirst.
This “born again” country of mine shuttles me towards silence.
Christianity, the New World Order.
But Christ didn’t die for these sins.
T Rump’s seduction, malignant.
His fetid, golf clap, impure avarice.
His pants, bigger than some borders.
Better check his fat ass for a cache of underpaid migrants.
Send the Orange Man’s bum to El Salvador.
“No Return.”
I scratch my nose to make sure my nose is still there.
I could scratch my eyes out.
It wouldn’t matter.
There is nothing to see here.
Move along.
I can’t smell.
What I touch, no longer touches back.
Could this coup succeed?
It already has.
Of honor and hopes, the ol’ “rope a dope.”
Cassius Clay became Mohammed Ali.
We need a new heavy weight boxer.
Our boxing ring is too small.
I am an American astronaut on a space walk—
if I let go of the rope,
If I forget to seal the airlock,
If my space suit springs a leak.
Apollo 11 should have brought more of the Moon back.
Rocks in a sack—1969 was so long ago.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.
O-Hi-O!
It’s only a matter of weeks before the felling of protesters.
Harvested for the scaffold of T Rump’s chaos.
Distraction.
Keep your eye on the ball.
America, we once amorously shared a bed.
Now you direct me to a photo of your long held partner.
The one who succeeded me.
250 years passes in a flash.
You once spent more than a day ignoring me.
I ignored you back.
Nobody won.
To you I sing.
My voice cracks into shards.
To you, I offer my hand but my hand is fake.
My fake hand falls off as soon as you grip it.
Ha ha!
To you, I wrinkle my brow.
I crumple my brow up.
I toss it away as litter.
I’m looking at my head from the top
How did I get so bald?
Did I lose more than one hair at a time?
I am no bald eagle.
My feathers, futile.
My wings, clipped.
I am the tail that wags the dog.
I am a frog in boiling water.
I am an embalmed alligator.
The promise the rest of the centuries kept, we break.
What I did an hour ago is fossilized into stone.
Overhead hovers a drone.
Every minute, a tick onto a tomb.
Another thrust out from the womb.
A giant leap onto the moon.
Why did we go there?
Because we could.
Now we expend our national effort,
Chasing cooks out from the kitchen,
Workers out from the fields.
My head spins faster than my feet.
I’m lost in the moment.
I fall to the ground.
From the freeway, I can see the Great Salt Lake.
What I thought was the roiling of its water,
Is the roiling of ten thousand flies.
MAGA Maggot!
Part Five: A Clown. America, we get what we want. We get what we deserve. Do not laugh too hard. You might break a rib!
My finger follows the void,
Where a smile once creased your face.
I once knew the sound of your steps.
I once knew the creaks of our shared planks.
I once shed flakes from my skin.
When I cried, you called it a “river.”
That river now dry.
The tracks left from the river’s spill,
Cracks on my face, hard burrows.
My thumb is now non opposable.
My thumb, a stiff stick to mimic agreement.
Everything is “A OK!”
There’s nothing going on here.
Move along.
What would your answer be,
If I told you the truth is too wide to cross?
Would the pearls of your eyes dim?
Would the blaze of your lips shrink?
Would the shine that we share collapse into Detroit?
Windsor, Canada is not an answer.
We need to change here, on this side of the border.
Right here, right now!
Our hands on two sides of a wall.
Our hands slide through the wall’s molecules.
Those molecules jostle between freedom and choice.
Another 250 years before our hands push through.
Touch me hard as you can!
I tremble at the thought of the touch of our fingers.
Do not move!
Puppeteers command.
Too much patience.
A skeleton hand is all that remains.
White bone pure.
No matter the color of the flesh that once encased it.
I watch myself seal a key into a latch.
I watch myself vote.
I watch myself worrying that this Clown is not joking.
T Rump has no sense of humor.
He’s never owned a dog.
I once played pickle ball.
It was the rage in the 2020s.
I made some friends.
No nutmegs for me!
Now the plonk, plonk, plonk of the game is naught but distraction.
The body politic is in a pickle.
A big, sour, vat that reeks of dissembling.
Now I play poker.
Any chump can see that this Clown is “compromised.”
It don’t take no Houdini.
I call you too late after too many drinks in too short a time.
You tell me “it’s over!”
“I could just come over. We could just talk.”
Am I pushing a dead poem up a dead slope?
We do more than talk.
America’s “booty call.”
The night bird chirps a chirp of Good Hope.
“That’s not my hand.”
A moon thralled shadow rustles the curtain.
The squeak of our mattress.
Our headboard knocks the wall.
Nothing more certain than a morning er****on.
“Let’s go again.”
I whisper, “oh say can you see, what once was a crime is now business as usual.”
You shut my whispering lips with a kiss.
Your kiss won’t let go.
Let’s go, again, and again, and again.
Our fornication as fervent as any revolution.
This is the “Resistance.”
A big, fat, squash, laden with worms—the squash lays on the ground as it thickens. The squash’s flesh is compromised.
MAGA Maggot!
Part Six—this Nation floats on anxiety. I once was here but now all is unfamiliar. I hear myself talking but it’s as if another is speaking. I hear my thoughts in your head.
What could be our bull’s eye?
If the price of eggs were lower, would you love me?
Biden’s lament, caught in Time’s spokes—no one ever gives days back.
This wall I can’t see but it separates me from the news.
Chattering maws.
Their pie holes spill the same drool again and again and again.
Ad infinite gagauseum.
That look.
The sleep of centuries stirred.
All “I” gouged out—the gouge is the point—the mind fog.
We the People forget our power.
To rule alone, what serves just the ruler, now justice.
Freedom once generous and strong—I slap myself again and again—
My flesh, rubber.
I wear a mask that looks just like me.
Land of the once freed, now again enslaved.
Home of the once brave now bow to a big mouth that won’t shut up.
Won’t T Rump ever stop blathering?
Bloviating.
It’s worse than the gnaw of a chainsaw.
It’s bad like the whine of a vacuum.
It’s the screech of a disembodied banshee.
It’s nails on a chalkboard.
T Rump is a balloon head,
With a bleeding gash for a pie hole.
Stuff that gash with pie.
All American blueberry.
Sweet potato.
A slice of Georgia pecan.
No matter the pie.
Shut him up!
S**U!
It’s going to take a lot of pie.
Start baking.
The great American “Bake off.”
Putin’s useful fool.
How to silence T Rump’s snout?
To scrape his fake, obsequious smile?
Too bad We the People can’t bop him in the snoz!
Are these ears mine?
Are these eyes mine?
Are my hands mine?
Is my nose mine?
My ears, my eyes, my hands, my nose.
All both big and yet small.
A bad warlock casts a bad spell upon us.
A coven of white skinned warlocks,
Now holds Lady Liberty hostage.
The warlocks of war.
My head is a spoon on a stalk.
My eyes, spindles—sick sticks.
My ears, flat leaves of deception.
My hands, graceless fans of infection.
My nose wrinkles.
I smell s**t.
America’s diaper needs changing.
The bad warlock’s foul name—
MAGA Maggot!
