The Perfidy Report

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