Systemic...

 © 10 September 2020, the Griot Poet

“You really drank the Kool-Aid,”

 

Should forever preface,

The logical fallacy,

Of asking a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

About his birthright privilege,

Laced Kool-Aid offered

By another cult leader, Jim Jones in Guyana,

To his follower’s abrupt departure to Nirvana,

 

He’s used to his privilege like oxygen,

And, couldn’t see living without it,

 

Packed with Pringle’s, Bill Barr,

Sat on his stuffed, comfortable ass

Snide as ever, flippant and crass,

Lying to Wolf Blitzer on CNN,

Captain of his own version of “jackbooted thugs,”

Can afford to answer so smug,

Since his headmaster pedophilic father,

Never had to give him “The Talk.”

Growing up in East Manhattan,

 

What do you expect,

From a criminal president,

That said:

“I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue,” and get away with it,

 

Getting away is something he’s done,

For 1,330 days since

“American carnage” inauguration,

That turned out to be

Both projection and promise,

Seven months into a once in a century pandemic,

 

Forget about his taxes:

I want the readout of his,

Sixteen conversions with Vladimir Putin,

From January 2020 to the present,

That Orange Satan said “wasn’t our business,”

 

Apocalypse means “revealing,”

Coronavirus has stripped the veneer,

Away from our long-held myths,

California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington are burning,

Thinking climate change is solved by raking,

The “exceptional” nation,

Can give no quarter between,

Democracy and fascism,

 

The nation cannot be “Christian,”

Nor have a First Amendment,

Where the people can redress their government for its grievances,

And enable such cruelty,

As seen in city streets,

By ambiguous, unidentifiable paramilitaries,

You’re treating the citizenry,

As if we were enemies,

 

“No man is an island,

entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were.

as well as if a manor of thy friend’s

or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind;

and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”

 

John Donne’s Meditation 17,

Speaks to this moment for me,

We are our sisters and brothers’ keepers,

Every single being IS essential!