"The Post Trump" and "Let The Chips"

The Post-Trump

We were responsible for dragging the last century out, and now found this one on our hands, along with that year lodged in the meat of it. Each week falling like a plodding foot, though we’d have sworn there were more than 52 in that burgeoning deck. We tried shoring up the months, yet still they’d bleed into each other: April leeching the margins of May; May leaving droppings for June. Nobody was fooled by this, but it served as a distraction to justice and common sense. Reality remained, but carefully hidden as though some hard nodule of a tumor afraid to be acknowledged. Most feared the whole thing would melt anyway, in a summer likewise unchained to days and quicksanded in the Brexit referendum. But we remained dwellers in that stubborn camp who believed that some hope-coated good could still be coaxed out of the shadows. We’d fish for it in each other’s eyes and read it encrypted in the song lyrics of all those we’d lost in the last decade: here, reviving Bowie’s long fingers tickling at the light emanating from his soft tongue; there, keening for a throaty Leonard Cohen Hallelujah. Then what we’d witnessed hands in pocket: the soft smothering by plastic wrap around us; chemicals spiking the falling groundwater, and fish rising with the seas to line our throats with mercury; the live drowning of our children in social media; the swap of a star-spangled pornocracy for our republic. We turned deaf-mutes vis-a-vis each other, despite the protests: the screaming in the streets which for onlookers rang as unintelligible as the cry of a caged animal poked with a stick. Others hurling turds at whomever stood on the other side of the same river we all must drink from. We hadn’t expected a civil war, yet, and thought it would be our kids left to curse us, as the oceans curdled and vomited back our lapses in every hell-conspired shade of unnatural disaster, tearing our pretty gardens asunder, with us old and senile or checked out of the picture. But it seems they’ve changed the schedule, yeah? And it’s come early to greet us. Before we’ve had time to organize the trials: find who charged those crimes against humanity. And what that used to mean.

Let the Chips

and 70s avocado green kitchens 

next season be replaced
by tight white
 
faux-modern incarnations
once warm and cozy
 
soundly ousted
by “updates”
 
buzzword for keepin up
w/t Joneses.
 
This ol’ house our head-
locked castle
 
with the market interest
on bread alone
 
Honey, it’s better
than broke and alone
 
the only ones
not befitted
 
and refitted
with contempo-sundry
 
accoutrements
and knife-drawer
 
clean accounts on
this side of ledgered
 
sidewalks.
Our keyhole sees
 
a camel through a needle’s eye.
Take us home
 
gentrified in the sweet
buy and buy.