Artwork © S.A. Griffin

 

Mein Trump

these words might be viewed as a broken mirror
a possible reflection of our changing world
a shifting allegory of mixed feelings
wedded to select history
tightly woven into
partisan
warps

a flux of fevered minds
before the nervous pyramids
of a rising tyranny

a stitch in time
caught
between text
commentary
and a
clear eye

an intoxicating echo chamber of communal blackmail
made mad by the electric spectacle of a republic
split into feudal factions

a televised diary of pain collapsing beneath
a staggering reality show of processed imagination
alternative facts and
misplaced loyalties
set in stone

the revolutionary engines of now
roaring a counterfeit oratory of blind faith
to the cheap seats

the drowning soul of our frenzied nature
mired in a quarrelsome hope beyond reason
our calls for justice falling on the
deaf ears of an apathetic Congress
locked in a legislative minstrel show of
choreographed failure to orphan our daily bread

the waving wheat of future generations
clashing in a perennial fiction to secure
sacred borders inked in blood
and bound by murder

America, you dead hippie
older, but no wiser
there’s red lipstick on your collar

you have become a blue movie of yourself
an embarrassing pornography of riches
a sexist horse opera of reckless enthusiasm
a capitalist slumlord caught in the malignant spin
of an old realm splendor

your ancient bigotries dancing a nervous breakdown
of whitewashed nostalgia
tired tales told and retold as race baiting atomic reminders
of spiritual union and glorious rebirth

a digital wildfire hardwired behind the rapid eyes
of a sleeping nation dreaming from a cup half full
of a past poorly remembered
promising a return to some
old Kentucky home
that never was

the working poor frozen in the pitch of their nightmare reality
lost between entertaining themselves to death
and the deep focus of a fat city on a hill strutting a
perpendicular demonstration of dysfunctional brilliance
pimping a rapid-fire charm of privilege from the twilight mud
where your wretched refuse seek shelter
caught in the vice of a superficial sentimentality
married to passion on the verge of tears
deep sixing any chance of a life lived without care
the ordinary genius of what living ought to be

our great cities a paved tangle of sprawling gentrification
shedding their skins in a strike of hypnotizing light
a witch hunting beacon of certain security
that cripples all pity with the graciously patronizing attitudes
of a vertically integrated state held spellbound
by a sanctioned hyperbole of day for night

talking heads in a decapitated theatre of
missed cues and deaf dialogue
that repeats itself indifferently

the bleeding edge of scripted hatred and outrage

immigrant song flees native destiny
severed by paralyzing conceptions of class
reborn forever speechless as intuition reconciled in despair
the origins of the deplorable deplorables

the tired and poor taken in by a winking treasury of
security at the apple’s eye only to destroy them
with their core desire to live in plenty

exiles reaching for a future balanced before them
like a postcard from the edge
in the hardly enough light

all eyes open to the fading memory
of life as a worker
a willfully neglected once and future fable
burning with impatience
for those who wish to
beat feet to a better life

refugee America, call home your rebel patriots
celebrate your revolutionary progeny marked
by their contagious activism and unshakable determination
to recast the narrative as a magnificent bright nova
of loving relief under an honest sun
to cure every malevolent branch of night

our wise minorities knighted by a renewed resolve
to abolish the degradation of the individual
the liberated better angels of the self
no longer shackled by guilt
soar with the ideal tenacity of a child to destroy
those social tumors rooted in dystopian fairy tales
of self-preservation

death peace takes the dispossessed into her
begging embrace at the gates of sorrow

caged children cut down to ragged shoots and weeds
at the border of hope

shadows cast against the memories of meadows
rest uneasy inside the heart of darkness
where the war is never over

mongrel America, author of
every lost cause you’ll
never find

who are we now all grown up
sitting before the starry candles
burning on our cake

thoughts and prayers
with the gravest of consequences
as we ignore the symptoms
only to become
the disease

 

S.A. Griffin lives, loves and works in Los Angeles.