all the craze this winter
is a film known as america
a excessive octane action-packed
thriller with plot twists galore
sufficient to white knuckle flip
the underside of your abdomen
& boomerang your senses
an enormous field workplace blockbuster
that includes authorities buildings
as soon as thought strong as fortresses
erupting in flame on the opening
credit that grand american
custom of issues blowing up
in stunning particular results
element a film as real-seeming
because the seemingly invincible villain’s
strip mall tan and absurd hair
of mysterious origin as he hunkers
thug dumb & oafish behind
the resolute desk flanked by
his legions the purchased & offered
duly elected their cowardly profiles
empty silhouettes destined to be
anonymous extras within the closing credit—
kowtowing asskisser spineless
senator gutless nominee—
now lorded over by the evil sidekick
horrible enforcer totally plausible
billionaire straight out of central
casting & breakout star of the season
(audaciously sporting his personal
mini-me evil sidekick) freakish
& gleeful in his unofficial capability
to punish and actual revenge
on any harmless bystander or
professional authorities worker
intent on regulating or impeding
his exploding empire of crashing
burning innovations designed to regulate
the universe the storyline is cliché
& too implausible (critics will argue)
the characters so shallow
& one-dimensional that drama
requires the violence be distractingly
excessive tech & adrenaline-pumping
simply because the heroes
should seem too principled
and ineffectual trailing behind
the wreckage in grey enterprise fits
lugging briefcases crammed
with memos motions
injunctions all tortoise-like
of their implementation
it’s not that justice is blind
it’s that justice is just too rattling sluggish
& criminals know to work the margins
to function steps forward with impunity
for a season as one unhealthy actor
not an actor in any respect a actuality
television hack can faux a mandate
to actual energy do actual injury
dominate screens massive & small
throughout america the place in the future
the nation will rouse
as if waking from a horrible
nightmare and failing the phrases
to explain this ordeal
will resort to simile
in a lot the identical approach
as survivors of actual airplane crashes
when interviewed about
their expertise will insist
it was similar to being in a film.
Debra Marquart is the creator of eight books of prose and poetry, together with an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Rising Up Wild within the Center of Nowhere and Gratitude with Canine Below Stars: New & Collected Poems. She teaches within the MFA Program in Inventive Writing & Surroundings at Iowa State College and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at College of Southern Maine, and he or she serves because the senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Surroundings. A singer/songwriter, Marquart performs together with her jazz-poetry, rhythm & blues challenge, The Bone Folks. For extra info: debramarquart.com.
Learn Debra Marquart’s different Letter to America poem, “Come November,” additionally showing in Terrain.org. And skim extra letters in Expensive America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, printed by Trinity College Press in collaboration with Terrain.org.
Header photograph by zef artwork, courtesy Shutterstock.
