by Michel Steven Krug
 |
| Cartoon by JOEL ORFF, SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL CARTOONIST, October 11, 2021 |
I.
Exiting the house select
Committee revolving doors
The Sergeant at Arms has eyes
For each witness under subpoena
Not ready to defy the privileges of
A defeated Executive whose policies foreign
And domestic are personal, useful,
Promoted to deceive,
American idolatry
Useful sabotage propagated
By the nouveau KGB
Useful USA, for re-re-election
US Useful idiots
To serve a majesty.
II.
Servile to posted democracy,
Offering truths of the click bait asserted.
Espionage at law when
In defiance of domestic channels
And congressional oversight
His majesty’s attorney general
Exacted deals to debase his rival
By erasure with stabbed glass
That avenges
Opaque defeat.
III.
We are informed by heavy flag poles.
We are all under subpoena,
Freedom of disinformation
Overwhelms veracity,
Its volume too temperate
Its tone too coherent
Its fidelity too rigid, too conventional
For an era that discounts reason.
IV.
2021:
Democracy has not been so degraded
That its franchise is mere debris.
The corrosion has been a cruel aberration
An arc necessary to sober
Cynicism and incredulity.
Exquisitely appalling, helium packaged,
Like ice melts in the spring,
Exposing all of its menacing emptiness.
Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He’s Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and he litigates. His poems have appeared in JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, The New Verse News, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, 2019, PRTN, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, the Brooklyn Review with poems forthcoming in other journals.