In the Emergency Room

There has been a weather change,

a stain on the fabric releasing foul air.
Birds of paradise lost. The candidate
is only the face of it, Bozo poster-boy.
Poll numbers putrefy our name.
What reeks most is the festering mass.

Orifice below the belt are said
to be indecent subjects,
better left unsaid. Mine
shut down. No waste water, no waste.
Shush! Have I no decency?  No,

far greater is an impacted mind, un-oxygenated,
fertilized for still-born ideas, deaf to the logic of civility.
Am I to bear witness to 1933, the year of my birth
and death of civilization in the land of Ludwig
and Johann? Will the world ask again, Why? How
could this have happened in the country of
Gershwin and Whitman and Emily Dickinson?

Are we to shred and disown what Lincoln

conceived and dedicated, Twain’s eye for hypocrisy,
FDR’s Nothing to fear, Kennedy’s, Ask not?  
Jimmy Carter reminds us that a strong nation,
like a strong person, can afford to be gentle,
thoughtful and restrained, can afford
to help others. It is a weak one that behaves
with bluster and bragging

Yes, you are scared. Yes, yes, and nobody hears you… except.
The promised rose-garden, Good-Humor truck, good work
in the widget-mill, familiar faces in the barber shop
mirror…all of them gone. Your man will clean
the excrement of America the same way
Joe the Plummer is the guy you call to perform a bypass.

My Trump moment. I am down in the mud hurling invectives.
I shall deny I just said that. He’s got to me, your honor,
insinuated himself, choking my duct, clotting the stream,
causing road-rage on the grid. Miasma hovers. Avoid inhalation.
America is in the emergency room, catheterized upon a table.

My mother knew back then. She understood duality.
How the dreaded draft causes disease cured only by fresh air.
I’m counting on this wind to shake dead leaves from the bough,
to urge lotus out of the mud and crocus to push up from dead land
to aerate our hearts.