The Perfidy Report

Day 36: Thought Experiment

–Hat tip to Millicent Accardi

When it is routine
to hold hostage
a domestic flight
to check the papers
of ordinary citizens,
when you have made it
legal to seize the assets of those
who speak out or gather
in groups of more than two
for fear we might contradict you
or plan some protest,
and shut the press down
for printing truth,
because you can’t bear to be wrong
or challenged—

When you make us
make art furtively
as though it were wrong
and dangerous (O it is, yes!)—

When you and your cronies have
stolen our wages
through bad schedules
and punch-clock shenanigans
and right to work for less laws,
stripped us of what little
we make
through exorbitant taxes
that subsidize your businesses,
given the bosses permission
to use our time and our bodies
as they like
without regard for our
humanity or safety,
no matter how many of us
are maimed or killed,
dumped us out
of the skimpy, fraying safety net
without arms, legs, or lungs,
poisoned the air and water
then sold it back to us, bottled,
like the whole country is
a company town,
neglected unto ruin
the bridges we cross
to work each day
and dug up the parks we cherish when we’re not,
disappeared the buses and trains we ride
so we have to all buy your cars
or walk to your jobs,
enslaved us with debt
for an advanced education you require
to work in the goddam mailroom,
made us so poor
we have to wager our lives
in your wars
to even begin to get ahead,
then send our children
to countries we’ve no business being in
and abandon them when they come home
without limbs or minds or sleep,
pawn off the excess equipment
to police and give them the power
they should never have
to decide who lives
and who dies for expressing themselves
or just walking down the street,
enforcing harsh laws that send more of us
(mostly Black and brown)
than in any other nation
to jails where we still work like slaves—

When you have reduced us
from a free(ish) nation
of free(ish) people
pursuing happiness
to utterly oppressed masses,
when you are huddled in your compounds
with your paid servants
and paid security,
unsure of their loyalty,
behind razor wire and laser beams,
as much prisoners
as those in your jails—

This ends two ways:
in misery for all of us
or death for you and rebirth for us.

Stop now, while you still can.
We are already
sharpening our tools.

–February 25, 2017, Harlem, New York

Day 35: Reflection

After the Mỹ Lai massacre

my father, World War II veteran

of belly guns and Berlin Airlift

and the afterthought in Korea,

turned away from Chet Huntly’s report

and muttered,

“How do you shave every morning, you shit?”

—not at Huntly

because Dad believed in a free press,

and free speech, dissent, and voting—

but at Calley, executioner

of women and children and old people.

 

Same question, different decade.

 

No point asking the SCROTUS

(So-Called Ruler of the United States).

We know he sees only

his own orange visage,

like the Wicked Queen,

as fairest in the land.

 

But you, voter, supposed patriot

and “good person,”

do you see the anguished face of

deported mothers, who were

working as hard as you are,

separated

from their citizen children

after 20 years,

or the woman denied brain surgery,

snatched from the hospital,

handcuffed and hogtied,

her nose bleeding from the pressure

of the growth in her head?

Do you see the fear of green card holders

who made the mistake

of visiting their elderly parents

while SCROTUS and his posse of bigots

were machinating?

Do you see the misery

of young people

forced to be someone they’re not

just to use the toilet?

Do you see hopelessness

in the faces of refugees

running for their lives

with only the clothes on their back

when we tell them

how frightened we are of them

and lock them out?

Do you see the despair

of your fellow citizens

facing the loss of affordable doctors

that kept them from losing

each other and everything else?

Do you see the grief

in the young student,

who must drop out

because college is too expensive

or because, despite her fine mind,

she never made it there from her

underfunded school to begin with?

Is the grayness of the world

without art or music or story or dance

there in your own face?

 

Or are you capable

of seeing only

yourself?

 

–February 24, 2017, Harlem, New York

Day 34: Ninth Circle

Claim you are the Party of Family Values,
and ban abortion
but rob the funds
for prenatal care, school lunches,
food stamps, teacher salaries,
college financial aid.
Get ‘em born
and forget ‘em, or better,
keep ‘em poor so
they become
the ultimate resource:
more fodder for your army.

Then dedicate your platform
to soldiers going to war for your greed,
but keep your own children
from the front, and
turn a blind eye
to the maimed, the homeless,
those your wars wounded
invisibly, who can no longer sleep
for fear that followed them home.
If they survived your war,
let them kill themselves.

 Say you are believers
in the American Dream
then deny it to anyone
who does not look like you
or comes fleeing some country
you can’t find on a map.
Or rob those already here
who thought they had achieved it
when you revolve back to your
pillaging corporate job.

Mouth the words freedom
of religion and conscience
but show no mercy
no justice,
no love.

You are
the worst kind of liars,
warping words
into unintelligible contradictions,
deceiving with fear,
and harming those who trusted you
while you prosper.

So many places in Hell for you.

–February 23, 2017, Harlem, New York

Day 33: Stolen

Days of Perfidy
Day 33: Stolen

Trumpacabra, like his namesake,
is a thief.

We have been robbed
of even the slightest sense
that the government belongs to
all the people,
of belief that it just might
be working
to make our lives better.
Worse, we have been robbed
of a fundamental right—
to pursue happiness:

To wake up and read the paper
without dread
of what new perfidy
we might find there.
To go to work without wondering
if what we do is of value
or if we should be
in the streets carrying signs, instead.
To not wonder if we should
get a gun
and learn to use it.
To not question whether
the art we make is frivolous or
not political enough.
To lie in bed and read novels,
go see a movie,
make love,
binge watch something other
than “The West Wing,” “Homeland,”
or worse, “24.”
To send our students abroad and
welcome others here.
To not have to examine
every fucking thing
our government does
to protect ourselves
and those we love.

This is his goal: to suck us dry
of joy, of security, of life,
leaving us as hollow
as Liberty’s crown
after 9/11.

–February 22, 2017, Harlem, NY

Day 32: No News

No news
that makes you look bad
(election statistics).
No news
that asks blunt questions
(where are your taxes?).
No news
that your spicey mouthpiece
can’t pronounce
(anything not English and some that is).
No news
from media you don’t like
(anything not Breitbart).
No news
that shows you’re incapable of this job
(all the news).

No news
that contradicts your
alternative facts.
No news
about Jews
even if they’re already dead
in a particularly satisfying way.
No news
about immigrants
greasing the wheels of commerce
especially if it’s about
you not paying them to clean your hotels.

No news
that doesn’t acknowledge your greatness.
No news
that you can’t deny.
No news
that criticizes your puppet master.
No news
that shows us who is the true
Enemy of the People.

–February 21, 2017, Harlem, New York

Day 31: What Matters

What matters to us
are all the things you fear:
whatever might mock you,
whatever you don’t understand,
whatever is not explicitly about money
            or your penis,
whatever shames your behavior,
whatever contradicts you,
whatever denies you
what you want
            whether others want it
            or not:

Women having the right
to say “fuck off” to you
and your grabby hands and laws.
Artists making art
you don’t understand.
The free practice of a religion
you don’t subscribe to
or no religion at all.
Welcoming arms at the borders
for those fleeing in fear
or just wanting another chance.
Wilderness uncolonized by
golf courses and hotels.
The free exchange of ideas.
The preeminence of facts.
Drugs that don’t bankrupt
or maim us.
An education
that doesn’t leave us enslaved
to banks or corporations
for the rest of our lives,
and teaches us to question everything,
especially authority,
especially your authority.
Air and water
that don’t poison us.
A climate that won’t kill us.
A future for those
not born yet.

–President’s Day, 2017, Harlem, NY

Posting for the following meme:

From Linda Kennedy via Marcia Morgan.

I would like to start a little ripple of resistance today. Tomorrow is February 20th, and Mr. Trump will have been in office for one month.

#NotMyPresidentsDay

I would like people to show what really matters to them: the arts, the environment, their family, their immigrant neighbors, healthcare. Share a picture tomorrow. Heck share it today!

Tomorrow I am hiking in a forest while I still can. I am going to post a picture with the hashtag above and #ThisIsWhatMattersToMeMrTrump

I would like to encourage us all to show, on President's Day, what is really important to US for those running our country.

 

Day 30: Papers, Mein Herr

How quickly it has come to this.

Amidst the lies of their non-existence
the papers surface,
a draft waiting to be numbered, dated, and signed:
eleven pages of White Nationalist
send-‘em-back-where-they-came-from
hate and what amounts to
ethnic cleansing,
turning a hundred thousand
National Guardsmen
on their own people.
How many of those
first- and second-generation immigrants
wearing their new country’s cammo
do you think would comply
with such an order, Mein Herr?
We’ve done this before,
in my lifetime
and yours,
when threatened by challenges
to the status quo.
Four young people
ended up dead
at a college in Ohio,
shot by other kids their own age.
And you would do that to us
again, Mein Herr?

There is no national emergency
involving immigrants,
no plot to blow up the White House or
even Target (no, white male citizens
who look a lot like you are doing that).
No need for the well regulated militia
necessary to the security of a free State
to participate in knocking on doors
asking for papers, Mein Herr,
and rounding up women and children,
fathers or sons
going to work and school each day
—unless you don’t like their color,
their accent, their food, their voices,
their music and art, their existence,
their right to freedom and opportunity
on a level playing field
that includes you,
Mein Herr.

Days 28 & 29: Setting the Tone 2. Excellent Genes

“Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.”
–Mark Potok, Senior Fellow, Southern Poverty Law Center

He surrounds himself
with wife-beaters braggarts racists
the delusional the hateful
the not just uncaring
but openly selfish
I-got-mine-to-hell-with-you
money grubbers masquerading
as entrepreneurs and job creators —
white, almost exclusively. Men, almost
exclusively. Wannabes.
Just like him.

In his world, there are still deviants,
but he is not one of them.
No, even his love of young girls
is Completely Normal.
Sex and gender are the same
one or the other on or off
Tab A in Slot B
missionary position and force
no choices no identity
but his
or what reflects him.

In his world, brown skin is a crime.
Black skin is automatically violent.
Mexicans are rapists.
Muslims are all terrorists.
And the Blacks —
no matter how they protest
silently, loudly, on their knees,
with fire and rage —
they should all
just
die.

It’s so simple to be him.
Always right.
Always good.
Always manly.
Our Glorious Leader
bred in the Fatherland.

–February 18, 2017, Harlem, NY

Days 28 & 29: Setting the Tone. 1. Leaders and Hosts

“Leaks, premature withdrawals, and keeping number two in the dark. An unsurprising start of an administration full of dicks and bullshit.”
–Amanda Gailey, Facebook

So much depends upon
who’s in charge.
Their opinions guide,
their foibles and failings
justify our own.
Words and examples become,
if not law, then reason
or lack of it.

Now, our own Pussy-
Grabber-in-Chief justifies
reducing women
to an empty vessel
awaiting the sacred jizz
(in whatever orifice,
willingly or unwillingly)
to be made whole and holy.
So they think.

Listen up, you tools:

You owe her—
that woman who hauled you around
for nine months,
you nutrient-grubbing parasite,
sitting on her bladder,
kicking her in the stomach at 3 AM,
tearing her open
in your frenzy
to escape,
but doomed to dependency
and forever resentful.

If she is a mere host, then
that’s what you were —
some tapeworm or fungus,
warping her brain chemistry
for your own survival
like something she’d catch
from cleaning the litter box.

And if you think we have no power,
no agency of our own,
we’ll be happy to knit you
a pussy hat
from your own entrails.

–February 17, 2017, Harlem, New York

Day 27: Law & Order

The Brownshirts
are next, you know,
in the obvious order of fascist deeds.

Already disguised like soldiers,
they will look like
Law Enforcement
not peacekeepers
because Enforcement
is more important than the Law,
and imposing order more important
than the free flow of Justice.

Already, they kill with impunity,
sanctioned by (com)pliant citizens
in peer-pressured in grand juries.
They can be bought,
in their off hours,
to secure the borders
of American Capital(ism)
as it marches through
sacred tribal lands,
and where they are free
to use the surplus,
government-provided
weapons of mass destruction
on our own citizens
without guilt or guidance.

Already, it’s a small leap
from what we have now
to the goose-step
and the stiff-armed salute
ending with a boot
on our necks, a fist
in our faces.

–February 16, 2017, Harlem, New York