By which I mean, the politics is nonsensical, not the poems. A friend threw a dinner party over the weekend, and asked everyone to bring a political poem to share. Some read from others, but I felt the challenge was to write our own. So I wrote a couple. This first one is a comment on who want to dismantle FEMA because of various paranoid fantasies:
To those who want to disband FEMA,
Who say it’s just a brown-shirt scheme, a
Thing that saps our moral will
While siphoning money from the till,Who hold all government in disdain
And think our fundamental plan
Is to leave each other as we are, in
A twisted sort of nod to Darwin,To deify the individual
And trash the institutional,
Push “survival of the fittest”
And hoist a vengeful God as witness –To those I say, all well and good.
Don’t call me during YOUR next flood.
And this second one is in response to a news item from the great state of Michigan, where a Court of Appeals has ruled unconstitutional a law that prohibited patrons from entering libraries while strapped. Here’s the story in the Detroit Free Press. Please be careful choosing the people with whom you argue about Norman Mailer today. Or Zane Grey, for that matter.
If America’s exceptional in any way,
I think it might be this’n:
We care less ‘bout packing heat in libraries
Than ‘bout men on TV kissin’.