Joe Flood photo
By
Wally Swist
Ringmaster of the Ridiculous
You wear that put-on
scowl on your evil clown face because
you want to look as imposing as
Teddy Roosevelt or Winston Churchill,
but if they were both alive today
they would revile your dishonest ways.
While addressing the boy scouts,
who are instructed in their acquisitions
of merit badges that living a life
is all about the honor you bring to it,
you could not even imagine what to say
about what living an honorable life
could be. One lie for you is as good
as another, and you might even believe
them for the moment they are issuing
from your mouth, but if your catchphrase
rhetoric of draining the swamp has any
element of truth to it, you can find
the origin of what needs to be dredged
within the cesspool of yourself.
Dark harbinger of nuclear war, wretched
palaverer of the insidious, foul-mouthed
encryptioner of what is fabricated and
false, you set people apart instead of
bringing them together for any purpose
of merit. It’s not that you lack integrity but
you don’t even know what it might be.
The fires of the afterlife smoke around
the envisioned caricature of yourself
on Mount Rushmore, wound in the razor
wire of your lies. Any pardon you might
grant yourself or your family will not be
enough for your exoneration in the eyes
of the citizens of the world. Your
wife, Melania, is boycotted in Canada for
participating in Invictus, an athletic
competition held for disabled war
veterans, because you have disparaged
the disabled. How ironic that she also
supports an anti-bullying campaign
while you bully anybody who stands in
your disadvantageous path. Merchant
of madness, ringmaster of the ridiculous,
impertinent loudmouth whose falsehoods
stick to the flypaper of your forked tongue,
may the karmic wheel come to a stop
at where, as with all of us, the actions
of our deeds come due, and may we
reclaim our world before your errant
schemes lead into launching us
into an act of desperation and the fallout
of your ballistic temper rains
improvidently across the intemperate skies
with the ultimate despair of no return.
Smudge Stick
Regarding a portrayal of Trump as being
a tepid as tap water, I believe that is correct.
But he is as dangerous as a Mussolini.
That is his quiddity and an ingredient of his
odd strength: he is and he is not.
And the allusion here to an insane magician
is keen here. He has crafted a life of being
a slippery fish and a slippery fish is he: a real
stinker of a bottom feeder. I once caught
a sucker fish so large I had to wedge it
between my left arm and chest so that I could
take out the hook stuck in the cartilage below
its lip with my right hand. I had been trout
fishing one morning and I brought up this
monster from out of its daze in the river mud.
I threw the fish back into the water, and it still
may be there years later. However, we don’t
have the same option with Trump. We can’t
just return him to our metaphorical river.
He is just a sheer bane on the existence
of mankind and its chance of surviving with
any possible amount of grace in the world.
I wish we could just extinguish Trump
like a bad candle—by snuffing it out
and purifying the wax of his errant ways in
a bonfire. I wish we could just use a sage,
sweetgrass, and cedar smudge stick to smoke
Trump out of lives and our consciousness, just
cleanse ourselves of his immanent madness
and his nascent evil nimbus, which flash
across the loony darkness of his clown face.
Jackass Bend
He said he was born on Long Island,
but we really need to see his birth certificate
for God’s honest proof. Truth is
he’s really from Jackass Bend, one of many
little Trumpvilles dotting
the Electoral College map red, where they
walk backwards instead of forward, never
tell the truth-truth, and always scratch their
heads. Trouble is the Russians have
the Kompromat on him—
the time the real estate mogul was nailed
on camera, hiring prostitutes
to perform a golden shower all over
the mattress the Obamas slept on.
American values in malaise. The raw
underbelly of what is great and righteous.
The branding of evangelism and evil.
Anywhere you look, everything that you
see, and all that that is heard from those
gilded lips is mendacity. He isn’t really
an American, and he isn’t making America
great. What is happening now won’t
ever make the country the same again.
He’s just an out and out louse.
He’s the man who pardoned Joe Arpaio
for immigrant roundups. He’s Commander
-in-Thief. He’s the lying thug
who is no one’s amigo, America’s shadow,
everyone’s Uncle Lucifer from Jackass Bend.
Wally Swist
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015); Invocation (Lamar University Press, 2015), and The Windbreak Pine(Snapshot Press, 2016). Forthcoming books include: The View of the River (Kelsay Books, 2017), Candling the Eggs (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2017), and Singing for Nothing from Street to Street: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018).