Sunday, March 5, 2017

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                

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