Ode For Trump

Ooze and contagion,
the screen’s trashy secretion,
burning through decencies.
Black spawn of himself,
Master and Creature of Media—of Performance:
The Fox News footage of himself, watchable all day,
every day, mesmerized, helpless
before the image of his own majesty
—swollen, irresistible, unwitting
parody of a wannabe Mafia Don.

He doesn’t read. Barely literate, he studies
to perfect the Act, the Staging.
His medium: politics as theatre, a mixture
of the cruel and the ludicrous.
He leaves governing to underlings and suck-ups,
believes the state exists to pleasure himself
and pay off his toadies.

The Creature likes to nod
and wink at his subjects. They’re all
in on his jokes, parrot his inanities
and drink down his absurdities.



Stupefied, he laughs and dreams
of his audience rapt and prostrate
in some ranch house in Sheboygan
or Paducah, lapping up the constant stream
of disinformation, wondering what ‘woke’ means
anyway, and how high you can get on fentanyl.
He loves the ignorant, adores the under age.

The Creature’s genius—there is genius—
is a fusion of demagogy and buffoonery,
smut and innuendo, grade-school name-calling
rife with infantile epithets and penis-envy to
titillate the basest of his base.
His vulgarity’s his trademark—
in this he is genuine, in all else reliably
a liar, a fake, a great pretender.

The face, frozen in contempt, never drops
the role, his fingers, fatty as worms, reach
lecherous and lazy under the red tie, inside
his oversize trouser-top to confirm that he exists.
He touches himself and belches out decrees like death
sentences, a would-be Kremlin Mountaineer
with imaginary enemies squashed and eviscerated.

O he delights in the tributes of the half-men, eggs
them on, makes them snivel and grovel, watches
himself lord it over them and checks to be sure
they meow and cringe and know who’s Man and Master.

This Koba can never have enough, knows his audience,
plays to them—to us, tuned in





like trained cockroaches
on our iPhones and iPads, always at the ready,
in pockets and purses, under our pillows and humming
on night-tables, hungry for the next image
and the next, the gesture, the fix, the firings
and deportations, the Greenland mania,
the perpetual stream of untruths and violations:
a carnival of grievance and intimidation,
the determined progress from gutter to sewer.

And the band plays on—as the audience,
addicted and insatiable, accepts with alacrity
the worst he can dish out: the racist euphemisms,
the senile postings with seedy doppelgangers
and billionaire cronies, the serial bromances
with tyrants and high-octane abuses of power.
All are transfixed by his bottomless greed and appetite
while his judges blow him kisses and approval from the Court.

See him there, in triumph, indifferent to the
condescension and loathing he inspires in allies,
the sea of MAGA hats surging relentlessly
from coast to coast, a tide of nonentities
sweeping across the nation in a stupor of
release, bewitched and unbothered,
their myriad pulsing screens bringing
them the message, their very own
Little Caesar primed to deliver them
from their fatal littleness and to
welcome them to his brave new world.