The calm of Lake
Erie is eerie,
looking beyond
its settled sheen
to Ohio,
where the anthem of
4 shot dead
emboldened
love and peace,
but it was never
really enough.
It is never-ever
enough, when oligarchy
makes its way
onto the menu, with a bowl
of a billion
bribes
to start you off.
This was what we
feared, when women
see their wombs
reflect a face—
Donald, Junior, Eric,
or even creepy Barron—
his Damien/Omen
persona,
that a monarch
won out
in the bitter end,
when democracy
is wrapped
in dollar bills,
when the dumping
of tea
in a harbour
no longer means a thing ;
when Charlie the King
would have been
a whole lot better ;
when orange
is the brand-new
white, just a swan
in the Russian ballet,
a marionette
in a psycho-
puppet show.
When we’ve tallied
up the dead, by the
dawn of ’29,
say it was simply
madness, the plethora
of un-vaxxed children,
of Latino girls and boys,
of the one who’s both
and neither,
that sailing
will always come first,
for the “enemies within,”
exactly like
M.S. St. Louis—
turned away with Jews
at Cuban shores,
the horizon of
what-was-home
now eyed
on the journey back,
the outline
of the hills that, like
us, rise then fall
and then fall once
more, worse than the
very first,
our betters
awaiting the relish
of lock and load,
not with swastikas
this time (though yes,
there’s always some of
those),
but the red of an
angry nation,
an angrier demi-
god,
not a crown this time
but a cap,
MAGA filling the void
of what was worshipped—
YHWH, or the great I AM,
His Son—surely
misconceived,
who’ll come back
with a flaming sword—
read it in Revelation,
from the pages
of James the First,
nearly one-hundred-
and-eighty years before
the scroll of We the People,
which, as it turns out in ’24,
means only some of us
are people:
the Caucasian
man and woman
buffing the shine
on the hull of their
yacht,
the one they’ll gladly take
across the lake,
from the city of
Sandusky,
to be Great
Again and Again,
"whether they like it
and whether they don’t"—
the cost of our
indifference, the shrug of
it is what it is.
Andreas Gripp
November 6, 2024
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