George, Don’t Chop Down the Cherry Tree!

Other than my closest friends,
why should I give two fucks what anyone thinks?
Who'll be with me when the story ends?

I’m tied together with rubber bands.
Knees and elbows make imperfect links,
but I'll dangle here until the story ends.

Just a puppet carved of wood.
I’ll dance the limberjack,
clacking until the music ends.

I'm glad I don’t yet wear Depends,
but why should I give two fucks if the furniture stinks
because I've got a wet hind end?

I’d as soon take as give a fuck,
but my nose pivots like a periscope,
standing up to suss out how the evening ends.

God, this scene is rinky-dink!
Who’ll blame me for climbing my beanstalk,
not caring what the Giant thinks?
How does Jack and the Beanstalk end?

The Voice of Athena

I’ve gotten to be dependent on Heather Cox Richardson.
She reads the news, so I don’t have to.
She keeps me from panicking

about all the reappointments in the Pentagon,
for instance, or all the abusive lawsuits
to keep Biden out of office. Heather Cox Richardson

sets me straight on everything—
like, is there going to be a military coup?
I’m just on the verge of panicking

when her fearless, reasonable
voice is right here, showing how we’ve gone through this before:
way back in Reconstruction

times, “socialism” already meant bailing out
urban folks whom rural and suburban folks don’t like,
right-wingers always in a panic-fit

that the government will take away their mun.
If we don’t like you, it’s not fair for you to vote.
That’s why I'll listen to Heather Cox Richardson
until our Nazi President is finally gone.

Don't Let the Devil Drive

It’s exhausting to hear the yammering of a narcissist.
(Please wake me when it’s over!)
A narcissist makes you settle for less

than you’d otherwise
have settled for. But you’re sleeping in clover,
and, except for the constant yammering of the narcissist,

you feel you’ve been blessed by fate.
But get out the nail polish remover
or you’ll have to settle for nothing less

than black pen stains on your lamb-white shirt.
You want to find another lover
to help you escape from your yammering narcissist,

but you’ve started to feel your very right to exist
is under siege. So, you agree to send the Jews to Poland,
settling for the very worst

bargain—letting a narcissist camp in your bailiwick.
The slippery slope goes all the way to
hell, when you’re enduring the devil’s bailiff’s
unmasked kiss.

Identity Poetics (Remembering the Dead Kennedys)

It’s nice to claim our identity
as south-European Renaissance yokels—
kind of sassy and uppity.

Folks’ll say it’s just our insanity,
but the joke’s on
them, because we’ll claim the identity

of one or all of the three dead Kennedys,
whose ancestors ploughed the rocks of
Bawn, then got sassy and uppity

and came to the USA—
and Joe put up a hotel. Their kids are broke
now, but they still claim their Kennedy identity.

Our only claim
to fame is, we never left the farm—loyal
villeins that we were and are—but still too uppity

to work on the same estate for more than a century.
We rise in the morning and soak
our feet in cider, love—flaunting our identity—
never not sassy and uppity!

The Villeinous Dr. Yokel

Why would anyone be interested in an old white guy with a PhD?
Are people supposed to be impressed?
But if you have some kind of a degree,

isn’t it dishonest not
to mention it? Even in my days
as a tech writer, I knew people thought my PhD

only meant I was
a big prick. It was tough to confess
to the degree,

actually. I had a job in an excelsior factory
quite a few years before I had amassed
the credits for my PhD,

but I had to leave
when a workmate sussed
out I had a college degree.

Not at all surprising that people are skeptical.
Beauty is as beauty does
if you’re an old white guy with or without a PhD
degree.