day THREE HUNDRED and FORTY THREE

Onagrocracy (for John Grochalski)

christ, I’m discouraged

Jay, I know exactly how you feel

we knew it wouldn’t be

four years of winning

maybe we thought shit

would get worse more quickly

but the banana republic

still can’t tell their ass

form a hole in the ground

small consolation at least

I don’t know why worse quickly

would have been better though

maybe after the hell of 2016

we are up for a fight

our blood up after another

slash and burn election

instead its been a barrage of ineptitude

things getting worse but slowly

a barrage of policy changes

some in secret some in the open

some buried on Friday so not to

ruffle the feathers of the nightly news

its hard to keep the outrage up

when everything is outrageous

everything is this is not my country

everything is hey America

you could have had a real democracy

there is a term from Fascist Italy

Onagrocracy, it loosely translates

to a society run by asses

to say that one must acknowledge

the tumble down to Fascism

America has become

maybe we’re too late

maybe we woke up too late

Christ, I’m discouraged too

Impeachment dreams

and tax bill cons run

through me, and I wonder

why I care this much, a country

is a social contract and a country

is fiction, we all drank the kool-aid

even as we learned to take each

Horatio Alger American Dream platitude

as they are, which are lies

over the last years I’ve been running

those classic American narratives

through my head seeing how fast

they get debunked, caught in lies

it made me angry, but I

always knew they were lies

and I’ve always been angry

I’m still not angry enough

we’re still not angry enough

christ I’m discouraged

I still got a bad case

of it can’t happen here

even as it happens here

jay, I know you’re discouraged

goddamn, so am I

but we still need our voices

we still got a fight

or try to fight the ways we know how

we still have to believe

in the ballot, in change

if there was any mistake it was

teaching us that was the truth

not a lie, if we give up

then democracy

is rehearsing

for retirement

--Jason Baldinger