Traveling In Style
A friend sent this poem to me. I’ve read it before. Since the first reading several years have passed. Now the words evoke a more personal reality, something that could be autobiographical. I guess that is the whole point.
A discussion of politics last night was passionate, mindful, with good insights being exchanged. This morning my sense of the evenings discussion was that it was all irrelevant, like naive children amusing themselves with word games. The violence and enormous sums of money that are at work in American democracy make the exercise of reason a passing sideshow. The center does not hold. By violence I refer to gerrymandering, and voter suppression. I am not alone. I travel with my foot-shooting, fellow lemming-citizens.
A Cynic’s Soliloquy
By Tobin Fraley
Streets spill over with hollow-eyed
mumblers who walk as if alive.
Their transfat hearts thudding in
rib lined cavities as their lungs fill with
calcified remnants of self-serving piety.
Turgid animals wallowing through
their own nightmares where the dream
of satiated greed collides head-on with
the mumbo jumbo of manifest destiny;
where truth is found on a cereal box
and facts, like scraps of dust,
are swept under the nearest Persian carpet.
Creatures who roam this floating, spinning orb
as if tomorrow existed in a tin can
to be opened just prior to the expiration date.
Travesty abounds for they have allowed the curiosity
that could have made them great to be sucked out
through their collective noses by tabloid aliens
or by hodgepodge conspiracies manufactured
out of fabricated paranoid fantasies.
Who the hell are these heffalumping bipeds,
the ones who sweat the blood of others and then,
thinking they are so clever, piss into the wind?
Who would have guessed, for as Pogo the ‘Possum
quipped those many years ago,
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Yes, them is us. The very same foot-shooting, lemming-esk,
self-aggrandizing, gluttons for irony, who ooze from TV ads
for quality American cars. The very same ones who stare
back from the mirrors of narcissism,
found in the glassed skyscrapers we have erected
as monuments to ourselves.
We are God’s April Fools joke on himself;
the ones running full tilt,
with our white canes tucked neatly under our arms,
towards the end of days.
