PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

by Anita S. Pulier

The campaigns are almost over.
The talking heads are on rerun.
I feel a strong urge to mop the bathroom floor.

Things are far from perfect 
and I am not sure
where the fix should start.

The ads have worked. The politics of fear grip me.
Clearly we are not who we were,
but I am not sure who or what we hope to be.

Wide awake I dream of raw power,
calculated intolerance and wrenching violence. 
Surely things were easier

before technology wired the globe,
when the world was vast,
unknowable, exotic.

Wasn’t life once lived day to day
by gut instinct, luck of the draw
take it as it comes?

A parade of bogus claims
line the mantle of my mind cluttered
by endless campaign puffery.

Do I understand so much more now,
about truth, deception
and the fickleness of time?

Still, I yearn for order,
for comfort, truth,
for simple decency,

for the strength to bother
caring, the naivete to believe
a single political promise and
 
the grit to mop the bathroom floor
at midnight, clear my head,

grapple with the paralysis of deep REM sleep.

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due out in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.