day FOUR HUNDRED and FORTY TWO

A Good Life’s Sleep

the American nightmare continues

the president is a rapist
rubbery lips slobbering all over
his Big Mac and Coke Force One
on his brown leather Barcalounger
behind his golden desk in the Elliptical Office;
special interest groups lobby for the protection
of AR15s, our nation’s most vulnerable citizens;
we have arrived at the upside-down place where
college crusaders in pursuit of social justice
have become in an alarming number of cases
fascists armed with digital indignation
and a year’s supply of virtue signals and SLAPP lawsuits,
willing to instruct the world (at bayonet point)
on what words we may now be permitted to say,
and this morning the Dow Jones school shooting average
this morning is a bull market this morning
and the American nightmare continues;
the president is a racist
opening his loving arms to the bakery owners
who “bravely” refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings;
we have arrived at the upside-down place where
special interest groups lobby for the destruction
of the national forests out in the country
and the National Conference of Catholics
issues a statement condemning Planned Parenthood
and Planned Parenthood enjoys a good laugh, asking
when the National Conference of Catholics
will do anything about the priests who touch children
and the American nightmare continues;
the president is a puppet
with a wooden body and dead eyes dreaming
of a wall tall enough to keep brown people away
while allowing Scandinavian teen models into the country,
and special interest groups lobby for the protection
of the members of President Rape’s cabinet
once it was revealed that fifty percent of them
were actually Russian apparatchiks
retrofitted with accessibility and woke bump stocks;
we have arrived at the upside-down place where
the national anthem is a safe space within which to tinder and snap
and the lyrics are now nothing more than sexual syllabics
hissing and slurring over strip club beats
that the machines contrive
and when you ask where is the love
where is the intelligence
where has thought itself gone
you find yourself on the list,
the red, white and blue dudebro-flavored fatwa,
this is stage one of the very end of it all
we have arrived at the upside-down place
this is page one of the Hollywood reboot of Revelations
we have arrived at the upside-down place
welcome to Sanctuary City,
where you can get a good life’s sleep

the American nightmare continues

--Rich Boucher

Bio: Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Apeiron Review, Soft Cartel, Menacing Hedge, Cultural Weekly and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Street Poet Review. For more, check out richboucher.bandcamp.com. He loves his life with his love Leann.