Elegy for American Democracy

We think too much of the ends of things, American
Democracy now, or my fountain pen giving up the ghost,
red-state votes cascading down like red ink drowning our
nation’s pain, box jellyfish stings on tropical shores,
deadly not-fish floating along, swarming folks on
crowded beaches. They force people off the edge to where
wild policies make an amazing mishmash of contradictory
claims. They’ve won a mandate, he crows, orders
from America to end all checks and balances and make
the President a king, ground by extremes into mud
in the American grain—a stalwart scion of pioneers
with would-be big ideas that make us great, not whimpering,
weak-kneed, fright-filled retrospects of supposedly better
days, written in the sands of time, with tentacles of poisonous
ignorance sunk in the ground, ignoring our Constitution,
written to keep the nation strong, sealed into civic acts
that spit in the face of bigoted asses, fools in wife-beater
shirts and MAGA hats, carrying their AR-15s to shoot
into crowds of people praying, going to school, dancing
with friends or carrying signs of protest around. They
praise outrageous acts by cops or courts, or right-wing
mobs, believing the lies of political hacks, divorced
from truths, ignoring facts, brainwashed by corporate flacks
and fake news hacks who fill the air with tweets full of lies
about immigrant threats and blue-linked policies promising
change, putting fascists down as they flood our streets,
shouting their hatred and repressive complaints that God-
fearing whites are being replaced by blacks and browns,
gays and women, those easily swayed, they suppose, by
broadcast productions of socialist newscasts sneering at Q’s
conspiracies about pedarest Dems, baby-killing Jews and
godless blues, faithless ones. The election was lost, however
undemocratic such losses may be when majorities fall to
the electoral college’s idiocy, which breeds these maggots
in congressional seats, obsessed with sweet young flesh,
with girls passed hand-to-hand across state lines, growing up
too soon as they and their friends keep partying on
like Gaetz, or Justice Bret, boofing his brews and lying
to Congress about precedents’ weight. They want to decide
every woman’s fate, to make them bear the product
of crimes of hate in a repressive state, where rights
once gained through years of strife, years of change,
protected all. The red ink spilled over all these things,
has overwhelmed the blue ink penned to introduce
change, progressive improvements, wise and humane
that lifted so many from historical chains. They’ve
splattered this page with a sanguine stain that forces
the fear of red-state rabbles into American lives again,
staining all with raging flames, wildfires gutting the homes
we built with centuries of progress, painfully slow
but needed again as red-maggot oligarchs lie and steal
and cheat and scheme, destroying the promise our
Constitution frames for each of us and all our dreams.