Tag Archives: poem on voter reform

What Can One Man Do?

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What Can One Man Do?

I’m feeling sort of creepy. I’m feeling sort of weird.
Everything is happening as I’ve always feared.
Each heroic patriot is spinning in his grave
observing how politicos are choosing to behave.
Opportunists rule the day. Liberty is dying.
If our founding fathers saw ,it would be grounds for crying.

Rights of free assembly are brutally curtailed
by countless senseless massacres, no sooner one man jailed
than another slaughter comes across our screen.
When did our land of immigrants turn so crass and mean?
What god puts kids in cages, rips a mother from her baby?
What scripture teaches brotherhood tempered with a maybe? 

One hundred thirty million of her native sons
slaughtered by our founders is how the west was won.
Our history books rewritten by a kinder pen
Mass lynchings in Arkansas? A secret way back when
history was written. Only now we know the shame.
Even at our founding, “more profit” was to blame.

If we are tired of hearing of greed and violence,
perhaps its time that more of us climbed down from the fence
and let communal voices be heard above the din
of Game of Thrones and other dream worlds we live in.
These films of gore and violence with which we are suffused
make us numb to how real people are abused.

We must take off our blinders and see the truth at last.
It’s time to break these heartless molds in which we have been cast.
Speak with your pen. Bring change about by changing those in power.
Do not turn to fantasy. Do not cringe and cower
in your homes for fear of guns. Ban assault guns for a start.
Show that real Americans have a kinder heart.

Cut our country’s cancer from where it’s gone to fester.
Remove our gallery of fools, starting with its jester.
Each one who sits upon his chair thinking his votes don’t count
votes to keep the status quo. One after one, they mount
a ship of fools who think that politicians are the same—
that refusing to make choices makes them without blame.

So thought the men who saw the tree with bodies hanging slack
and overlooked injustice because the men were black.
If your God is one of mercy, does he not view all?
Does he not see even the smallest sparrow fall?
Would he sanction kids in cages, mother ripped from baby?
Does the God who loves us all temper justice with “maybe?”

What can we do about it? Take up pen and make a check.
Vote out the opportunists. Seize injustice by the neck.
Protect our dying planet. Seize our final chance.
Don’t think that fate is ruled by impartial circumstance.
Looking for a solution for what one man can do?
Take pen in hand. The answer, my friend, is simply you!

Prompts for the day are weird, creepy, and memorialize.

Please read Anglo Swiss’s post before mine.  You may find it in the Reader or HERE.

A Leader Reader

Politics distress me. They send me to my bed.
I prefer the nightmares that I conjure in my head.
For to get over nightmares, it is a piece of cake.
I simply give up sleeping and remain wide awake.

But the world situations that most bother me
do not disappear when I turn off the damn TV.
They just go on mouldering when they’re not in my view
while all our fearless leaders just do and do and do.

I think that the solution might just be to tell them, “Stop!!!”
Every nation on the earth trying to be cop
for all the other nations seems somehow not to work,
for sometimes the one supervising is the biggest jerk!

Though I don’t know the answer, perhaps the Swiss are right.
Perhaps yearly elections would do less to incite
pork-barrel legislation when each man has a vote
the needs of common men might replace needs of men of note.

The only problem we might face, doing so much voting
is that it just might interfere with our TV remoting.
It might be necessary to replace “reality” shows
with just plain reality–where everybody knows

each bill that’s passed and all the facts of governing our nation,
so we would grow up wiser each succeeding generation.
Voting done on cellphones or Android application
might bring out the vote at last, much to the consternation

of politicians dependent on propaganda’s lies,
hoping that the real facts never come before our eyes.
All this campaign financing a phantom of the past
while we’re presented with the truth–finally, at last!!!

(I cite poetic license, folks, as my excuse for this poem. I realize this is a simplistic solution to the world’s problems.  Our government in the U.S. is perhaps too large and too complicated for the Swiss system of governing, so it is  best this world is not governed by such as I!!!)

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: Dear Leader–If your government (local or national) accomplishes one thing this year, what would you like that to be?