MY POLITICS
I walk in my sailor’s coat,
Upon a cemetery mound,
Sober and sound,
Acutely aware of my imminent death,
The brevity of this life,
And the assurance of my final breath.
Such is my political foundation.
Whether of a liberal or a conservative persuasion,
We either love one another,
Or else we all shall perish,
From ocean to ocean, from sea to sea,
Along with our dimorphic society.
And so now it has been said.
From the falls of Niagara
To the Mississippi’s mouth,
New York and California
Vote blue unlike the south.
(For Hamilton and Jefferson
Still duel for our nation’s head.)
Nevertheless, we shall all see eye to eye
From San Francisco to the Texas sky,
When come the final days.
Meanwhile in the Federal laze,
Republican powers are rapidly declining,
The Democrats are spending whilst dining;
Discotheques
And ghettos
Still dance a jig to the left,
While Wall Street jives
To the vanishing right.
Congress is in a haze.
And America is bereft
Of reason, of a visionary gaze.
Children weep in the streets today.
The western world is wild.
You! - Young, male seducers,
Without thought you conceive a child,
The woman is but your prey,
With whom you casually mesh.
And after she surrenders
To the weakness of her flesh,
To your bold enticements,
To your beauty, to your seed,
To your words, to your looks, to your natural charms,
You trade yourself in for what the government renders
In place of the basic need
Of a loving father’s tender arms.
And you! - Spineless statesmen,
Intolerant of all other ideas,
Save your own small, tiny, microscopic specks,
Hypocrites, all!
You shall spend our every dollar
Until we are all in abject poverty.
Wait come soon some terrific summer,
Come some horrid autumn,
Come some miserable, terrifying fall,
The crash of ’29 will seem like a sunny Saturday.
The dollar will cease to hold a penny’s sway.
It will be a colossal, collective ruin,
This savage bruin,
This future rue,
This approaching monster from out of the blue.
(Just add, my dear economist,
The sum of two and two.)
For what happens when the tide of debt
Reaches those with gold,
The aristocrats, the young who are privileged,
The poor and the old,
The poet who scribbles verse in the air,
The pilot of a jet?-
Now no one seems to care.
(Because it has not happened yet.)
But then, too late,
All factions will cave
Upon rocky, tragic shores.
Even Presidents,
Senators,
And Congressmen
Will become outright mendicants
Wandering on a homeless glen,
Begging for dimes in corridors;
Suburbs and cities
Will join their disaster, their downfall, their fate;
For they shall resemble broken caves
Crushed like sand,
Beneath a storm of tidal waves,
With their greed and contraband.
And the farmer
With his fiddle,
Brown, with a bow,
Mahogany and long,
Will serenade our wavering grain
With the pain
Of a sorrowful swan song,
Beneath our once brave skies
Of a rich, dark blue.
Yet after all that I have been through,
Knowing that to give is to save,
If we fade like Greece and Rome,
At least I shall have a home
In the silence of my grave.
~ John Lars Zwerenz
