Fix It Yourself

Maybe there is an idiot president,
lying, bullying, abusing,
stumbling over graves and heroes,
playing on our sins and devils for ratings,
captivating our screens
making us complicit in his creation.

Maybe there is an idiot president.
No more blind spots and platitudes for you.
No forgiving makeup for white America.
Every ugly lie in neon orange.
Exhausting outrage and exposing the real horror.
That the actions I see, the words I hear,
exist as a shadow, a ghost, a reflection in a lake.

Maybe there is an idiot president
so poor in spirit and substance,
that he babbles about chocolate cake,
and mansions, and golf courses, and Playmates,
and helicopters, and magazine covers.
He babbles in surreality, beyond facts,
and into an uglier truth,
an absurd decadent nightmare.
Making me see my own greed and stupidity,
exposing emotional poverty.

Maybe there is an idiot president,
a braggart, a sexual predator and philanderer
who ignites marches, driving women to the polls,
decimating Evangelicals no longer able to lie,
unable to pretend that their hatred is God's will,
they can't stand for any morals when they stand with him.

Maybe there is an idiot president
fitting, appropriate, deserving of his people,
who feed themselves flag pins and anthems
and bumperstickers and aphorisms and dream boards
and selfies and self-help, and chicken soup for the soul
and prosperity gospels and profit prophets and fresh-to-death angels
and billionaire Shivas and slim-fast Jesus and rapstar Buddhas
and glittering garbage as treasure
and #mefirst more than #metoo
and watered the ground with pretty little perjuries,
salacious slander and deceit.

When the last president said 'we are the change,'
we fell asleep, craddled in our comfort.
'I voted for a black man,' so I'm off the hook.
Not realizing that 'Fix it, nigger'
is the real national anthem.
We slept in late, beating the pillow of our good opinion.
The Buddhas came kindly and with gifts,
cheering us on, and our hatred oozed out anyway.
His kindness was too unfamiliar. He must be from Kenya.
He can't be one of us. He doesn't like to play in the mud,
and throw his feces at the walls, and scream and rant.
He must be a Muslim or a bisexual. He has to be an 'other.'

So now the Buddhas come with wrath and war,
screaming and stomping the ground.
threatening fire and fury, nuclear holocaust,
and repealing the estate tax,
smokestacks in every schoolhouse,
clean coal in every crib.

The idiot president set the house on fire.
We run around in horror. Who did this?
We look for the idiot president and only find a mirror.
And we are awake.