Doomed Yokel collects the Yokel songs written between 2017 and the present End Times and marked blood red for self-preservation, politics, reality, COVID. The Yokel gets down to the grim Root.
2017
Villanelle: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same
The rains came and the levee broke—
our little house to the landfill.
No one sighed and no one spoke.
A character in an orange cloak
tried to rob an empty till.
Then the rains came and the levee broke.
Our tugboat had a broken yoke.
The bar moaned like a windmill.
But no one sighed and no one spoke.
All would vanish at a stroke—
quicksilver bread loaves, knife kill—
when the rains came and the levee broke.
Then didn’t the whole river shake?—
levee, catfish, corn still—
no one left to sigh or speak.
Just me, Huck, and some other folks,
waiting for the next big drill.
No one sighed and no one spoke
when the rains came and the levee broke.
2018
Villanelle: Amygdala and Die
When we think about the brain, the amygdala,
we figure we're all programmed from
the start—
not like our Savior said, or the Apostle Paul.
Paul said, We’re free. True, we took a fall
when we tried to put the ox behind the cart
and learned too much about the amygdala,
and our crops failed, and our wine was gall
(and raising wine grapes was an
interroired art).
But it wasn’t actually the Apostle Paul
but Our Lord Himself who said, Bathe, y'all,
in the blood that flows from my sin-cleansing
heart.
My love has canceled your amygdala!
So we heard and did, and tried for small
changes not big. We dwelt apart
and didn’t think much about our Savior or
the Apostle Paul.—
bringin’ salvation grape juice—jugs of it!—
but Mr. Lizard-Brain Amygdala
him very self on a devil train from hell? © John Wenstrom
GOD(ald) Trump Villanelle
Is the POTUS a perfect parody of JHWH?
Listen while I sing this song.
Aren't we glad we have GODald for
our President?
We thought we hated evil, but we were wrong!
GODald brags about being hung
like a donkey—not reticent,
our President. So, I sing this song!
Satan’s main claim to fame was being flung
from Heaven with all his minions. Hey, there’s
a precedent
worth following, am I wrong?
But GODald has such an appealing
come-along,
though always angry in the face,
my President—
snarling abuse, while we howl along.
His friends are trying to revoke our get-along,
and life's worth nothing to an immigrant.
His friends think they hate evil,
but they’re wrong.
GODald’s like the Viet Cong—
by fighting him we make him stronger.
Listen while I sing this song:
We thought we hated evil, but we were wrong.
Remember the Alamo
I took a long, long walk. So, where did I go?
Did I sally forth to get some lunch?
I’m trying to take things kind of slow.
You don’t want a blow-by-blow
account of my day—when, following a hunch,
I took a long, long walk. So, where did I go?
I was just trying to get in between
Curly and Moe.
Those fingers to the eyeballs hurt a bunch!
Curly’ll need to take things kind of slow
(birds’ll be tweetin’, frogs croakin’ low)
after Moe socks him with a bucket punch—
Curly’s consciousness taking a walk. So, where did it go?
It walked right into the Battle of the Alamo
where human bullets hum and bones crunch,
still trying to take things kind of slow.
Hey, Santa Anna, they’re killin’ your soldiers
below.
You need to take a walk just to escape the
stench—
a long, long walk. So, where will you go?—
never forgetting to take things kind of slow.
© John Wenstrom
2019
Cat and Mouse
Grazie, Ry Cooder.
We are many, Buddy, they are few.
We own the power if we’d only seize it.
Do we believe that’s true?
Who are we, anyway?
Only those who are still here this instant.
We may seem many, but some few
of us have already vanished into
darkness, and more will soon be wasting in
that Tophet
the few are building for all us true-
blue hearts, who'd like to renew
the battle but can’t quite get down to it.
A moiety will survive—like those few
wandering enclaves after the breaking of the
great Sioux
Nation of the Black Hills
by men whose only true
love was gold. Who
will live to tell our story? Who’ll be left
to hear it,
of the many, Buddy, that we were—now few—
and swear ‘twas true?
© John Wenstrom
Resistance
If I bought a tin of impeachmints
with Trump’s face on it, would that make me
feel better?
(Not sure if they also had resistmints.)
I could print RESISTANCE,
with Trump’s face on it, on a sweater
that I could wear while I suck
my impeachmints.
But I worry that someone might resent
me saddening them with my blue distemper—
my attempts at resistance
misfiring badly because only my friends
will ever read my nauseated blather
on Facebook, day after day, about
the impeachment—
until finally we just make each other sick
and fearful, looking for some way to feel safer,
but mistaking—fatally—obsession for resistance.
Scoffing and wringing our hands, we do
his bidding.
We think we’re fighting, but we’re eating
the wafer.
Our breath will stink to heaven, no matter
how many impeachmints
we suck down—until we BLEED resistance!
© John Wenstrom
Peaching the POTUS
Grazie, Rosanna Rosanna Dana.
What’s all this about peaching the POTUS?
Never mind.
Love these Colorado peaches!
You and I never listen to the speeches,
so we have no idea
how peachy and funny the POTUS
can be. Thank God, Nancy Pelotus
seems to be pretty canny
about how to keep the Colorado peaches
out of the nauseous
spectacle—flung into the nasty
leering face of the POTUS,
with his bratty peach-fuzz
dimples, his whinging for the camera—
peach juice
running down his sticky chin—fruit-
fly galaxy
declared. Never mind peaching the POTUS.
Let’s all feast on the peaches!
© John Wenstrom
Righteousness Is Shameless
Oh hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold? Paradise Lost, 4.
Three things that have no shame:
Nature, God,
and Donald Trump.
Nature red in tooth and claw,
said Tennyson.
But no one blames
nature for the pain
it inflicts. And we assume God
is more all-knowing than Donald Trump.
But even that lump
of shit may get off Scot-
free and forever evade shame.
Well, God deployed the Son—
not Jesus (Please!), but kind of like
Cromwell’s Model
Army. Donald Trump
Fits that God to a shameless
tee. No wonder the angels
had to revolt. Satan had enough shame
to be a lot more human than Donald Trump!
Wile E. Coyote Speaks
Before the Twin Cities Climate March, Sept 20 2019. Grazie, Lesley Gore.
May an emergency be a plumb criticality?
Do I have to do something about it right now?
Does my poor planning constitute
an emergency for me?
The emergent fact might be our mortality.
Better sound the alarm, and how!—
emergency become plumb criticality,
no longer hypothetical—
atoms about to blow!
Does my poor planning constitute
an emergency for me?
Well, I’m basking in prosperity.
I make as much dough as the law allows.
This big show of criticality
is just us crying at the party
(You would cry too if it happened to you!)
instead of planning for an emergency.
OK, to finally see
if there’s really something to worry about, I’ll
consult the D[Tao]w.
The emergency’s not an immediate criticality.
My poor planning will nuke the emergency!
© John Wenstrom
King Kong at Rest
After the Twin Cities Climate March, Sept 20 2019.
I’ll sing you all a song-o.
I love to write!
It won’t be very long-o.
I danced on the Capitol lawn.
Whose streets? Our streets!
I’ll sing you all a song-o
about trying to right the wrong-o,
fighting the good fight.
We’re about 10,000 strong
today, singing—We don't have very long!
Earth-abuse is not all right!
But I’ll sing you all a song-o
about how it feels to be King Kong
punching helicopters, skyscraper-high.
Not very long
before the gunners have him on the ground.
To King Kong, and to all, I say: Good night!
I’ve sung you all my song-o.
It wasn’t very long-o.
© John Wenstrom
Sleeping More
Sleeping more after I wake up
gives the whole day a tinge of unreality.
It’s a hiccup
in time, a pencil tap on my coffee cup.
The day gains (or loses) elasticity
when I sleep more after I wake up,
and roving gangs of fairy sheep
enter the vicinity—
cloven hooves a-tappin’ hiccups
in my wickiup.
I find I have a proclivity
to sleep even more after I wake up,
expecting that the awakening may
be abrupt—
blown off the dimity
by a Trump-hiccup.
Well, I’ll herd them sheep’s asses into
my pickup
and feed ‘em on barley!
sleeping ever more after I wake up.
Waking’s just a brief hiccup.
The Land of Online
A crowd of beseechings,
howling like the plebes
in the James Mason Julius Caesar.
I’m OK with the kvelling,
but it’s tough to ignore these pleading
robotic beseechings
that suck the money
out of my checking account, wheedling
like the conspirators in the James Mason
Julius Caesar—
that lean and hungry
John Gielgud especially, voice a
cracked needle
drilling in Brutus’s ear with his beseechings.
Roland Barthes observed that every
character in the James Mason Julius Caesar
is constantly sweating
from their deep and weighty
moral dilemmas—Cicero, Vaseline-smeared.
But no matter how moving the beseechings,
that Et tu, Brute? murder
accomplished nothing.
© John Wenstrom
Johnny Got His Gun
Grazie, Dalton Trumbo.
It would be nice to know the root
causes of all my problems,
but I’m not acute
enough to candle the truth
at the bottom
of this chasm. Roots
know better than to dig too deep—
wise rhizomes—
more astute
than I am with my cute
ghosts and golems,
on my Kurtzian quest to pierce to the root.
Show it to me! Don’t stint
on the solemn,
awful news! How resolute
I am! and soul-damned to boot!
Worst thing’s the earworms—
Yokel songs that keep reverberating
in my hazmat suit.
2020
Relevant, or Revenant?
Everyone is reacting to images in the media.
Most of the time we’re fighting each other
about stuff we could be reading about
in an encyclopedia.
Don’t we find the media tedious?
Wouldn’t it be better
if we turned the hideous
nonsense off and had a tranquil,
solitary moment reading—
not the newspaper, please! far rather
an article in an encyclopedia
of Jungian psychoanalytic hermetica?
We’ll see our mothers
again in the guise of the Medusa,
our fathers in old graveyards in Moravia.
We’ll be sleepwalkers then, following whose
druthers
about watching this vampire-panic
in the media?—
famished ghosts sucking down the
bloody bever—
brew that lets us scream in human
language and post it in the media,
draining the encyclopedia!
© John Wenstrom
You don’t have to watch the news to know what’s happening,
even if you only listen to Spanish-language radio
and you don’t know Español.
You’ll get to know all the poll
numbers when you're hanging out on the Google patio—
you don’t have to watch the news to know what’s happening.
And, of course, you’ll get to see the face of our evil-troll
president—that terrifying daddy-o.
And you won’t need to know any Español
to comprende the grunts and hisses of all the jackals
that are gorging on our hid-eo.
You won’t have to watch the news to see them ravening.
Just pay attention to what you spend your money on—
that’ll be groceries and the rent on your home, Hidalgo!
How you say en Español?
They’ll get their filthy mitts on your pensión,
but you won’t care because you’ll be jubilating in calico.
Turn off the news to see what’s happening!
Translate it into Esperanto!
Spirit Leaving the House
Law presupposes goodwill.
Without love, law is without force.
A fair city on a hill
can’t abide without the trilling
of birds and the neighing of horses—
goodwill
sung so as to twang
the chords of our better
instincts. Or city of the dead,
built on the chattering
bones of Pluto's
children—wills
of evil men who’ll kill,
first love, then law, in due course—
our fair city on a hill
site for a rock drill.
Whited sepulcher,
said Jesus. Law sans goodwill—
graves filled.
© John Wenstrom
My Soul Is a Witness for My Lord
You can photograph a sunset or a solar eclipse.
holding a camera here on earth,
But where can you stand to shoot the Apocalypse?
You can shoot the rapids in a canoe or a kayak
(for what that’s worth),
and you can even photograph a solar eclipse
if your gear is up to it
(maybe from somewhere
in St. Paul). But where do you stand to shoot t
he Apocalypse?
When the Apocalypse happens, you can’t plant your feet
so’s to get a level eye on what’s coming forth—
a lot more challenging than a solar eclipse,
because you’re part of the whole god-damned
To-Hell-With-It.
You’re witnessing the hideous birth,
not just of the old familiar crappie that eats the sun,
but of the dreadful million-fangéd Snake—
each fang a unique internet port.
Photographing a solar eclipse?
Piece of cake! But you can’t shoot the Apocalypse.
Feeding the Darkness Bulldog
Darkness loves to be hated
(why are we surprised by this?)
because, when we hate it, we can’t stop
watching it.
(Some of us need to shun the light
of whom we did or didn’t vote for in 2016.)
Darkness loves to be hated—
his face is terrifying and his rants
are outrageous.
How much we hate you, Darkness! we scream,
as if we’re afraid that if we stopped
watching you
you’d say something even more hateful
and we’d miss it
because we were lying down on our civic duty
to give Darkness what it loves—
namely, hatred.
It seems somehow that we are fated
to squeeze our eyes wide shut and kiss
a poisonous toad a million times
by never ceasing to watch it.
Darkness receives our hatred
with the threatened promise to be
with us always.
Darkness loves to be hated
because, when we hate it, we can’t stop
feeding it.
© John Wenstrom
Perfect Informational Self-Sufficiency
Are these good times or bad times for those
who are paid to talk?
Is there any point in awarding Emmys and
Pulitzer prizes?
I drive my own news truck.
I’ve got a story about a gorilla with buck
teeth riding the roller coaster at Denver's
Elitch
Gardens amusement park. You can
listen to me talk
about the ineffectiveness of vaccine
drugs (there's a new opinion piece in
Your Health Online).
I’d say these are the best times ever for those
who are paid to talk,
except that they have to compete with yokels
like me who can keep rebroadcasting
Jim Jones’s
mad drivel through the speakers on the roofs
of our news trucks.
You may think we’re in hell, you may think
we’re in clover,
but you listen to me rant while fact sleeps
with the fishes.
And I'm not even one
who is paid to talk—
I do it out of pure altruistic
generosity, just adding my voice to the chorus.
Not sure if anybody listens to anybody talk
anymore, anyway, but we’ve all got our
own news trucks.
© John Wenstrom
Glass Bead Game
Hesse dubbed our time the Feuilletonsperiode.
I guess he just meant newspaper era.
He wasn’t thinking about Facebook.
Feuilleton’s French slang for talk of the town.
There was plenty of hilarious
stuff in Feuilletonsperiode
periodicals, I assure you—
even funny cat pictures,
just like on Facebook.
What happened was, there was a plague,
and. not coincidentally, a war—
discussed endlessly on Feuilletonsperiode
political pages. Then civilization as we knew it
ended—
human culture preserved only in holograms,
like Princess Leia in that wookie flick—
every remaining thing an exaggerated
simulacrum
of whatever it might have been in real time.
That’s what you call a Feuilletonsperiode.
Welcome to Facebook!
© John Wenstrom
Here Also the Unknown, Anxious, Brief
Thing, Life
Jorge Luis Borges, Texas.
How worried am I obliged to be?
I worry to the max.
Everything bad we can foresee
will happen, they say,
so I’ve paid in taxes
all the wor I was obliged to ry.
I’m looking forward to a calmer day
when I can relax
into a future I can sanguinely foresee.
Now it sucks to be me—
surrounded by electronic gadgets
that bombard me with images that worry
me to death. But, by God, I’m free
to be a slouch and rely on stock prices
for security because I can’t foresee
a day to beat the day
when Davy Crockett died for me in Texas.
How worried am I obliged to be?
How much gore can I foresee?
© John Wenstrom
Television People
Ghosts can’t be smelly
because they’re colder than the clay,
not of the earth, earthly.
Does a ghost have a belly
button—ectoplasmic remnant of a navel?
People seen on TV
can be ghastly—
snowing us with their jabber-dazzle.
We can’t tell if they’re earthly
or just resentful ghosts yelling
about hell. If it’s stinkier than the offal,
you know it’s neither fish nor
flesh but something really, really
gross. May this TV show fizzle
because it pertains to nothing earthly
or spiritual either?
More lethal
than the most odorless ghost!
Of the shit, shitty!
The Laugh's on Us
does erecting a nude statue of the POTUS
in Central Park make America more of a joke?
The POTUS appears to be awaiting strokes,
and he has a pink rump.
Here’s one, folks,
he seems to say, not waiting for
the other dicks
to have their hump—
America’s no joke!
Here, take a look
at my fully inflated MAGA-pump.
Have fun while you can, folks,
before you get whacked
and sprayed with goop.
America’s no joke,
like Richard Nixon was no crook!
Thank me for taking off the emperor’s clothes!
Face it, folks—
America is now just my abusive joke!
Don't Let the Devil Drive
It’s exhausting to hear the yammering of
a narcissist.
(Wake me up 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 ink 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 because you’ve let 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.
End Times
Vomit Whip
American freedom has become a scourge.
Why did people vote for Donald Trump?
It’s time for a purge.
I’m already singing an ipecac dirge.
My purge is flogging like a fire pump.
American freedom has become a scourge—
not just flag decals on refrigerator
magnets, but pictures of McConnell’s rump.
It’s time to purge
my database, I know—all these regurgitated
memes—a million goosebumps
on bare butt cheeks submitted to the scourge
of American freedom, loved like the plague.
Why aren’t we tired of living in this dump?
A scourge will bring about a purge,
we hope, a fart of holy rage
blown from Uncle Sam’s bare bum.
Life in America has become a scourge.
Yay, here comes the Hurling Judge!
© John Wenstrom
