day FORTY FIVE

donald trump

my grandmother

used to get all of these old

star and enquirer magazines

from where i don’t know

and when we visited

i sat in the living room reading them

while my grandfather

drank beer and smoked and watched barnaby jones

this was the 1980s

and donald trump always seemed to be somewhere

cavorting on a boat or in one of his gold-plated offices

or shooting off his big mouth in the newspapers

in the gossip rags he seemed like a don juan

chasing women twenty years younger than him

and even at eleven or twelve years old

i hated his ego and the supposed largesse of his wealth

when i was a little bit older

i thought i could handle marla maples

better than that combed-over fucker could

at least she wouldn’t look so wide-eyed and scared

i had no clue about the power of money

now, all the years later, passing buildings

with his name plastered on them for over a decade

i have no illusions

and donald trump is running the goddamned country

of all nightmares

he’s running it right into the ground

with his grease-ball kids and a pack of neo-nazis

still cavorting in mansions and shooting off his big mouth

americans have proven to be the world’s great big idiots

a racist, sexist, xenophobic, overweight nation

of star magazine and enquirer readers

with no hope of tangible intelligence in the future

and of all the lonely thoughts that i had growing up

i never would’ve thought sitting there in that smoky living room

reading those rags as my grandmother bitched to my grandfather

about what a worthless son-of-a-bitch he was

that donald trump would be president

i would’ve hedged my bets

on michael j. fox or clint eastwood

justine bateman in a gold miniskirt

a comet crashing to earth and wiping us all out

or just a meteor hitting manhattan

yeah…something simple like that.             

                 --John Grochalski