The Perfidy Report

Day 1,083: Pissing Contest

This is what you really wanted
—not just to treat the country
like your privately owned company,
to let the taxpayers pick up your tab,
and pay for your real estate,
to golf when you will at our expense,
to be “in charge” in your mind,
—but to be seen in the world
as some kind of force
to be reckoned with.

So you killed a man.

Not on Fifth Avenue with a gun
in front of your grandiose tower
but by remote control
using someone else’s trigger finger
to keep your tiny hands clean.
You are not strong enough
to shoot someone
face to face,
not even a real enemy.

Like any bully
you take no personal risks,
only prey on those
less able to defend themselves,
on a tiny country that cannot afford
to go to war with us, but must do something
to save face.
In your mind, the voices are always clamoring, clamoring
the truth of who you are:
fool moron imbecile idiot weakling worthless
so you must wave your dick around
when you can find it.

And it cost a man his life.

I have a friend here
whose son is the the Air Force.
He’s young and talented,
learning to be a pilot.
This morning she came by my desk
and whispered We’re going to war.
Pray for my son.

Only your sons would weep over your grave.
But so many of us
would be happy to piss on it.

 

Day 346: The New Year

2018.

Twenty days and it will be a year

of your pillaging, rape, and burning

of the economy, citizens, and our Constitution.

Your bilious shadow

hangs over our heads like

a toxic cloud

we watched roll in from the election-night horizon

in horror,

its momentum seemingly unstoppable,

hope gasping in its wake.

The stench, since it arrived,

is unbearable,

the effects, corrosive.

Lady Liberty’s robes are pitted

with the acid of your bigoted breath, smeared

with the smuts of your fascism.

Your EPA advisor declares

the air too clean for human health,

so you destroy the agency that protects it.

Record fires scorch California

where the seeds of a new republic

are rooting,

the smoke of your lies about climate change

suffocating science and progress.

In the cold of the rest of the country,

we see our words of protest come out as hoarfrost,

nature trying to freeze you into silence,

save Florida and Texas,

strongholds of the whirlwind of your hot air.

And even they have seen themselves

under dirty water

filled with the shit of deregulation

and greed.

 

Nature rebels at you,

as we should do.

Only earth itself is waiting,

of the four elements,

to shake you off

like filth from a wet dog.

 

-January 1, 2018

Day 329: Gag Order (Seven Words)

Hard to talk about 
the effects of 
poverty, old age, and disability
or the state of the nation
under Trumpacabra
and his minions
when you can’t say the word
Vulnerable.

Hard to talk about 
either the need for Social Security
(though it’s not one, dammit. We
paid for it.)
or the attitude of 
too many rich folks
when you can’t say the word
Entitlement.

Hard to revel in 
the beauty of who we are
and demand more variety
in representation everywhere
when you can’t say the word
Diversity.

Hard to recognize, let alone
make someone
welcome in the world
when the way they
look at their own body
can’t be spoken: 
Transgender.

Hard to warn women
about the effects of Zika
or the myriad other dangers
to life in her womb
when you can’t say the word
Fetus, 
and harder still to choose
to end a pregnancy
when every stage of growth
is a baby.

And all too easy
to delegitimize the work
of researchers everywhere
who make your greedy actions 
and false morals 
inconveniently stupid,
and to promote your own
“alternative facts,”
when we can’t use the words 
Evidence-based or 
Science-based.

English has almost a half million words
and synonyms for nearly everything.
It is the glory of our multi-ethnic
hybrid language, its sources
Germanic, Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon,
terms stolen from nearly every tongue
in existence.
They fall in an out of usage
all the time, new ones added
to increase our word-hoard,
each one with its own truth,
its own power
no government can erase.
Use the ones now forbidden
or lose your voice
entire.

–December 15, 2017

Day 316: Various and Sundry Treasons

1. Animal Farm

 

In the morning,

Mueller catches a big fish,

one that’s been fighting

for a long time.

Finally, exhausted by the firmly set hook

he pleads guilty

to a much lesser charge

and turns from fish

to foul, singing like a canary.

His former boss Tweets Who? Who?

Some former Obama staffer

of no consequence.

But no one is fooled.

Son-in-law is in the chute

to the slaughterhouse now,

then perhaps our parroting VP,

and Boss Hog

Mad King Donald himself,

and more, until, perhaps

we’re down to Hatch

and a Constitutional crisis.

 

2. Guy Fawkes

 

In the evening,

when good citizens should be in bed

and the work of good government

over for the day, perhaps

seeing the end coming,

Congress votes yea

to giving the hard-earned wages

of the poor and middle class

to them that’s got already

despite the outcry

of those they’ll be robbing.

 

This is what comes

of a poor education:

forgetting history,

ignoring literature.

Someday, our own children will sing,

Remember, remember

the first of December,

the Tax reform treason and plot.

 

Care for a Molotov cocktail?

 

–December 1, 2017

Day 296: Bromance

It’s like a lover’s tryst,
this meeting in Vietnam.
First you say
you won’t see each other
for clashing schedules
then—surprise! There you are!—
together in matching blue, 
hulking over his small frame,
shaking hands, looking adoringly at him,
this ex-spy with his sinister smile.
And you’ve asked him point blank 
if he would betray you
and of course
he has said No, my darling. Never.
Though your election pleases me.
And you believe him.
Of course you do.

He is your tin god, this tyrant,
like your abusive father,
more grossly masculine 
than you can manage,
stronger than you 
in so many ways.
How much pussy he must have grabbed!
You can only imagine.
And now he’s got you 
by your short hairs
with a stack
of kompromat
and you’re the pussy.

–November 11, 2017

Day 308: Tear Down to the Post-Apocalypse

Almost a year
since the election
and the time has taken its toll:...
Lost sleep, lost dreams, lost hope,
broken hearts and bodies
drowning in fear and tears.
Around us,
the world gets dirtier, nastier,
dumber, devolution and decay
outstripping even common entropy.

Tearing down
is always easier
than building,
demolition and destruction
easier than
the thoughtful shaping
of a just world,
and these men
are the masters of chaos.
Their world has no foundations
or building blocks.
It’s a wasteland
of greed and self interest,
filled with the ruins of institutions
of learning and light,
scavenged to put up
cobbled-together walls
by the people
who think
good fences make good neighbors.

–November 2, 2017

Day 281: Let Justice Roll

“But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” 
–Amos 5:24, New American Standard Version

The avalanche
begins with one pebble,
the torrent
with a raindrop,
Trumpacabra’s fall
with one indictment.
Who will it be?
There are so many likely candidates 
to choose from:
Good Guy Flynn,
Venal Jared of the Flak Jacket,
Martial Manafort the Money Launderer,
Junior the Rotten Apple
—a Who’s Who of corruption
in a swamp of mud
spattering the People’s House.

Let justice roll down indeed
and wash them all
away.

–October 27, 2017

Day 278: Decency

“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” 
–Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954

You’re no Joseph Welch,
Mr. Flake.
You talk a good game 
about sacrificing your career 
for principles
but you cannot condemn 
the monster 
in the Oval Office.
Reckless, outrageous, and undignified,
anomalous,
is the best you can do.
Is that all that disgusts you?
Trumpacabra’s coarsness,
his lack of respect
or humility?
His corruption of the spirit, and weakness,
the degradation of our politics?
True, but there is so much
more.

This is not just about 
our grand experiment
in self-governance,
not just about
our place
on the world’s stage,
not just about
who we are as a nation,
or what we might be.

It’s about our humanity, our decency
or lack of it
in consenting to be led
not just by a buffoon
but someone 
far, far worse.

Say the words.
Speak the truth.
The man is a racist
white supremacist, 
a sexist misogynist, 
serial sexual criminal, 
a fascist, a 
liar. 
Say any of those words. 
Any of them.

Bring down the fire.

–October 24, 2017

Day 268: This Machine Kills

This is a couple of days late because it originally went to my personal wall, sparked by the death of my friend and colleague, Miranda Merklein, who was an adjunct, organizer, badass, and shitkicker who took no prisoners. And now she's gone. this is for her.

 

 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

 

 “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that … you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!”

 

–Mario Savio

 

This machine kills women

with coathangers and bitter herbs and

fists to the belly

with bottles and dishes upside the head

with poverty and rape

with wealth and rape

with rape and overdoses of

Hey baby, you should smile

and Hey baby, gimme your number

and not a doctor in sight

of their bank account balance

not a man in sight

who will stop it

 

This machine kills children

with the acrid smell of roaches

and fumes of chemicals

in underfunded hospitals and

overcrowded schools

and unsafe neighborhoods

by taking all hope of anything better

away

and blaming them

for being less than perfect

for being Black

or not-white of some other kind

or female

or without citizen-parents

or without papers of their own

because it thinks they

should earn their keep

once they’re born

 

This machine killed my friend Miranda

with lies about the American Dream

and the Yellow Brick Road

of education

with dangled carrots of a good job

just out of reach

with a back-breaking load of irredeemable debt

and a cohort of colleagues

in exactly the same boat

unable to help

—by first taking her job

then her home

then her animals

sending her daughter into the army

in desperation

dragging her across the country

from one coast to the other

with more lies

and discarding her

like so much snot-filled tissue

 

This machine kills anyone

not rich enough

to help themselves

unlucky enough

to suffer fire flood hurricane

cancer crippling or preexisting conditions

foolish enough

to stand up

against it

 

Kill it

before it kills us all

 

–October 14, 2017

Day 265: Make Hate Great

It’s a first, all right,
one only you could revel in:
being asked to speak...
for the fourth time
to an officially designated
hate group
that thinks the deaths of homosexuals
might be a good thing,
and don’t know what to do
with the fact that het and homo
ain’t all there is.
No other sitting president has done so,
but you have so much
in common with them.
Both of you lie
like rugs
about people you hate
and you hate
just about everyone
who’s not like you.

Great leadership by example.

No wonder
the Nazis were back in Charlottesville
with their tiki torches
like it was some
goddam barbecue
where the main course
on the grill
might be human flesh.

–October 11, 2017