Category Archives: Crooked politicians

America’s Burning

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America’s Burning

Count the faces. Take a tally
of the peaceful protest rally.
Their routine is most well-planned,
masks in place, placards in hand.

Enter police. Down on belly!!!
Enter newscasters for telly.
Teargas in the people’s park.
Truckloads arrive after dark.

Rioting and smashing glass.
Other dark deeds come to pass.
Using protest for excuse
to bring discord and spread abuse.

Violence becomes routine.
Authority a cruel machine.
A whole nation comes to grieve
the loss of what most folks believe.

An orange bigot, Bible raised,
pontificates, posturing, crazed.
A landmark of our country’s pride,
struck by a flash as freedom died.

Has our nation come to this?
This puffed-up, prideful bag of piss?
Shame on a country who listens to
a fool who’s rotten through and through.

Let sane men take the lead  and bring
some sanity to everything.
Equality and fairness reign
under a government more sane.

People stand up. Demand the best.
Do not give up. We cannot rest.
Seize back the country we have sold
to men who only care for gold.

Give succor to the halt and lame.
Do not play the money game
subsidizing rich man’s greed
instead of helping those in need.

Color is just an outer skin
and not a mark of shame or sin.
Use these sad times to make a start
to start to recognize the heart

that unites men from every nation,
every interest, every station.
Save our earth and save mankind.
Restore justice, and make her blind!!

Prompt words today are belly, landmark, grieve, rally and routine. I swore I’d write about something other than the rallies and violence that are tearing at the flesh of the whole world, but impossible to follow these prompt words anywhere except back to the current matters at hand.

The Big Lesson

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fusion-medical-animation-EAgGqOiDDMg-unsplash Image by fusion medical animation. Amazing that something so beautiful
could cause such devastation.  As beautiful mankind has, as well.

The Big Lesson

Though isolation is the pits, illness is much worse,
so I must think of things to do while dealing with this curse.
I’m drinking lots of water, blowing hot air up my nose,
disinfecting doorknobs, washing all my clothes.
I have to pass on going out on dinner dates with friends
and make do with freezer food until this virus ends.

I clean out all my cupboards, dig into dusty files
and sort my poems from years ago neatly into piles.
I cancelled out on reading poems at our bi-monthly gathering.
Instead, I overhaul old poems and set about the lathering
of all suspected surfaces: computer, hands and phone.
(The cats both head out for the door, thinking “Leave us alone!”)

I spend all the time with me I used to spend with friends.
When I run out of toilet paper, stock up on Depends.
I eat lots of veggies, wear gloves to read my mail.
Read Facebook obsessively for each new detail
of what they tell us that we must and we must not do
to increase the odds that we will not catch this flu.

This virus has us isolated—true without a doubt,
so I guess I’ll look within since I can’t look without.
I’ll think about past lovers, then drag old albums out
to try to find more memories for me to think about.
While contemplating doomsday and plotting out our ends,
we might as well survey our lives and think about old friends.

Forget that crazy orange fool who tweets and  issues orders
concerning odds and planes and ships and hands and gloves and borders.
Go back to where we should have been, listening to sager folks
with science degrees and doctorates who are not human jokes.
And when the world’s restored to order, when walking past Trump Tower,
try to remember and take heed that nature has the power!

Give her due respect. Mind the oceans and the bees.
Stop fracking and pollution. Earth’s not there for you to seize.
Protect other species, for everything’s connected.
We are not meant to seize and own each thing we have selected.
If nature turns against us, it’s written in the plan.
When creating the natural world, the last thing made was man.

So less depends upon him in the natural way of things.
The world can do without the reordering he brings.
Already wild animals are taking over towns
as a single virus topples presidents and crowns.
We cannot use the atom bomb or missile, drone or gun.
If we wage war with Mother Nature, she’ll be the one who’s won!!!

Adi Wahid
Charles Postiaux
Ehud Neuhaus
Jordan Hopkins
Kyler Boone
Kenny Zhang

Writing prompts for the day are looking within, pass, isolation, overhaul and water.

All photos were posted on Unsplash and are used with permission.

H-e-e-e-re’s Donald!

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samantha-sophia-8bLGxhsR8sY-unsplashImage by Samanta Sabina on Unsplash, used with permission

H-e-e-e-re’s Donald!

Our nation’s growing jittery. It seems our ruler’s broken.
In the land of liberty, freedom is just a token.
Surrounded by his family, his fumbling words are brisk.
He issues crazy edicts, putting the world at risk.
As he pens crude letters to men of more distinction,
we cower in our houses. fearing mass extinction.
He poo-poos all our scientists. The climate’s doing fine.
Who cares if the whole planet is headed for decline?
Glaciers swiftly melting. Forest fires raging.
He overlooks the hurricanes, intent upon his caging.
Children are the biggest risk, so he sends them packing.
Makes military decisions with very little backing.
On his situation comedy played on the largest screen,
he spins out the same old story: our country has grown mean.

Prompt words for today are broken, ruler, jittery, brisk and family.

Serving up Karma for Donald Trump

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Serving up Karma for Donald Trump

When it comes to authority, Karma takes the cake.
What starts out as a landslide ends up as a quake.
She is no polite lady. She dishes and she serves
what you’ve done in one life as the coming life’s hors d’ oeuvres.
So be careful of schemes you cook up, for there is no beating them.
Chances are that in the next life you may well be eating them.

 

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Prompt words today are spacious, authority, lady, karma and take.

 

Skewed Liberty (This Country for Sale)

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Skewed Liberty

Everything is tilted. Slightly unaligned.
The constitution set askew. Liberty maligned.
Some of the well-heeled citizens think that this is fine.
They cannot see that everything is slightly out of line.
All the pretty Philistines queue up at their tees
while their flunky lawyers determine what to seize.
Contracts with the Russians. Schemes to sell off national land.
Cronies helping cronies. Off-shore drilling by demand.

Rivers being sullied and oceans compromised
while insuring rights to bear arms are exercised.
Certain pious preachers line up behind the svelte,
proclaiming to the masses that they know what Jesus felt.
Indeed, the smallest sparrow  no longer matters much
so long as all the mighty increase their greedy clutch––
all the moneychangers, corrupt to the core,
filling all their pockets with the money of the poor.

Surely it is clear that at ruling they’re inept,
and if he was watching, surely Jesus wept
as all the pearls of liberty were cast before the swine
with each self-serving libertine declaring  what is “mine.”
What is true no longer matters. What “they” say is now what now counts.
They say it’s holy scripture as they settle their accounts.
People, take off your blinders. Consider what is real.
One nation, under God, was not set up for them to steal!

The WordPress prompt today was skewed.

Dim Prospects

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Dim Prospects
(A Hyperbolic Modest Proposal)

We’re blotting the sun out and dimming the stars
with furnaces, factories, wildfires, cars.
With overproduction causing glut after glut,
it seems our improvements are anything but.
Man’s once-shiny future is now looking dim,
and he’s pulling the whole planet under with him.
Fires and hurricanes, tsunamis and quakes,
rampaging hillsides and drying-up lakes
are messages sent that the earth’s fighting back—
giving us warnings of things out of whack.

When fat cats in limos and thousand buck suits
have usurped all the seeds and kept all the fruits,
and all of their products are made by machines,
three dimensional copiers making our jeans,
our autos, appliances, organs and cars,
our TVs and glasses, our bikes and guitars,
we’ll all need welfare—mere motionless blobs
once they have “teched” away all of our jobs.
And since welfare is something that they’ve soundly booed,
what will the masses do for their food?

Where will we sleep once all of the money
all of the milk and all of the honey
is in the pockets of those gazillionaires
cushioned away in their billion-buck lairs?
Keeping a few of us here on the scene
to garden and cook for them, to serve and clean,
they’ll let unwashed masses starve in their cots
and buy from each other their trillion dollar yachts
And perhaps they’ll be happy with what they’ve created:
machines making products ’til their needs are sated.

Now that they’ve purchased our ship of state
and made it their own, it seems that the fate
of unlucky millions who’ve gone overboard
for lack of the medicine they can’t afford
is nothing to them, for not one of them cares
how any common citizen  fares.
Lest we riot against them out of our need
for money for food they’ve usurped in their greed,
issue guns to the populace. Let us dispense
of  these unneeded masses. To them, it makes sense!

The prompt word today is dim.

The Rack

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Tenterhook: a hook used to fasten cloth on a drying frame or tenter.

The Rack

The whole world stretched on tenterhooks, suspense our daily bread.
We hardly know how we should feel until the news is read.
No gentle folds around us to cushion out our dread.
What country now in warfare? What new group fallen dead?
The sadness of the whole taut world unravels in our head.
The fabric of society loosening thread by thread.
Billionaires grow fatter as children go unfed
when politics and Wall Street are so smugly wed.
Like bleating sheep we follow. We are so easily led.
What was meant to swathe us  hooks us on the rack instead.

The prompt today is tenterhooks.

Black as His Soul

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“A black object is black because it’s absorbing all the light; it’s not reflecting any color.”

Black as His Soul

Black as the soul of POTUS, dark as Beelzebub.
As sable as the darkest night, tarred as an axle hub.
It does not serve you well, my dear, to fall in love with black.
It draws your whole light into it and gives you nothing back.
Black will draw and quarter you, stretch you on the rack.
It is the shade of Mack the Knife, a ripper known as Jack.
There’s no good connotation for this tone of night.
You simply cannot find one—try howe’er you might.
Black robs you of your light and keeps it as its own.
It is a cruel jailer, sitting on its thrown.
Who would guess so many could be so misguided
as to elect a president who is so ill-betided?
What an ugly irony that he who decries colored skin
should have a soul whose pigment takes all color in.
No matter how you’re drawn to it, please take a different tack,
for no matter what you do, black doesn’t love you back.

The prompt today is black.

How the Mighty Will One Day Fall

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I would pay a pretty tuppence
to see his highness get his comeuppance.
His smug assurance, his galling preening.
He’s like a babe in need of weaning,
sucking at the teat of fame.
What other mortal needs his name
written on towers around the world?
He’s Ozymandius, stone lip curled
in cruel splendor, sure in his power
reasserted on every tower.
But remember, as he counts each coup,
how all the mighty have fallen, too.
False knights wear armor prone to tarnish.
His Midas touch will lose its varnish.
We’ll laud the day when he’ll be dumped—
That day when he’ll be over-trumped!

 

The prompt today was mighty.

“A Little Bird Keeps Tweeting Us!”

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Here’s another wonderful Simon and Garfunkel parody on the subject of Mr. Trump’s Tweetings.

 

Here is the source website for this.