in the manner of Noël Coward, with tinkling piano
Like a blowtorch to asbestos,
The Almighty’s keen to test us
In a way that nearly always entertains.
With a knowing smile He chastens, He
Takes aim at our complacency
To guarantee we won’t turn soft, or vain.
It’s as if, at His own pleasure,
He employed a cosmic dredger,
That was poised at any time to scrape and plow,
Just in case we thought we’d bottomed out,
Had reached bedrock without a doubt,
And were sure it couldn’t get much worse than now.
But there always is tomorrow,
And we’ve found out, to our sorrow,
That the worst can worsen worser than expected.
Take our current situation—it defies amelioration,
Till it seems like God Himself could not correct it.
Oh, we oughtn’t to be scandalized
To find the White House vandalized
By rogues and chancers, plutocrats, and cons,
But this latest iteration boasts a record concentration
Of the sort of scum that floats atop a pond.
With the drone of putrid tweetings
And the endless unhinged bleatings,
It is all enough to render one quite solemn.
It would seem—of course, one never knows—
That to try to keep us on our toes
God’s dredged us up a soul-destroying golem.
He has lies for each occasion
And a list of depredations
That his lackeys all are willing to abet,
And he says he’ll make this country great,
But indicators indicate
That’s not about to happen—(ahem) not quite yet.
As he mocks, maligns, and threatens,
He inspires ranks of cretins
To intimidate their neighbors brown and black.
With their slogans and their marches,
And their swastikas and torches,
They survey what isn’t theirs—and want it back.
They’ve decided that the man next door
And total strangers at the store
And worshippers in temples are their foes,
And that out of all the sundry types
The right to claim the Stars and Stripes
Is theirs alone. How could they? Heaven knows!
In the days of brutes long fallen
Such as Mao Zedong or Stalin,
They at least could cite doctrinal points of view.
They’d explain away atrocity
With political philosophy,
And only do what dogma bade them do
(Or so they claimed).
But compare this clown shambolical,
In his helmet formed of follicles,
Who measures out his neckties by the yard.
He’s possessed of a psychology
So riddled with pathology
That he’s nasty just to make his penis hard.
I don’t hesitate to shame him,
But in truth I do not blame him,
After all, it’s just the way that he was fashioned.
In the manner I was raised, at least,
They said if you can’t praise, at least
Accord that sort your pity and compassion.
He can’t help it if he’s not too bright
And doesn’t read and barely writes
Or hasn’t much to live for but his wealth,
Or that, eyeing his reflection,
It bypasses his detection
That there’s pocket lint where others have a self.
But no similar forbearance
Can we grant to his adherents,
Who’ve forsaken everything they learned from Mother,
And allied themselves with rot and sleaze,
Made governance a foul disease,
And behaved as turncoats even to each other.
Let them proffer no excuses for the insults and abuses
They as cynical enablers heaped upon us,
For the way they cruelly cursed us all
By daring to immerse us all
In something that’s so toxic and dishonest.
They’ve disgraced themselves and me and you,
Their chain-migrated forebears too,
And descendants through the next five generations,
Yet pouring poison down our well
Has not, as far as I can tell,
Inspired in them the least self-condemnation.
So, once God has had His little joke,
What say we take these dreadful folk
And board them on a fleet of little boats,
Where, as they drift for mile on mile,
Without an outlet for their bile,
Eventually they’ll cut each other’s throats?
Let’s carve their names in tuna,
Fly the pieces to Bermuda,
And then stand upon a pier and chuck them in,
Where at depths of many fathoms
We will let the sharks have at them
In the hope we’ll never see those names again.
We, the upstarts who protest today,
Were none of us born yesterday,
And we know, with hist’ry’s lessons well in mind,
That it’s not a liberal fantasy
That crimes against humanity
Quite often sprout from seeds of just this kind.
Be it we who made this thing occur
Or God (or Zeus, if you prefer),
Empow’ring all these wolves in sheeps’ apparel,
There can be no further dredging
Of the sort that I’m alleging,
’Cause we’ve truly reached the bottom of the barrel.
If you lie with dogs, you wake with fleas,
If you lie with germs, you get disease,
If you lie with poison, you’ll pick up the toxin.
It’s a fine, imperfect nation
But it cries for fumigation—
It’s our henhouse, and we’ve gone and let the fox in.
Barry Foy is a musician, song lyricist, and the author of Field Guide to the Irish Music Session and The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies. His “Rabbit Story” was selected for Paul Auster’s anthology I Thought My Father Was God, and Mr. Auster read it on NPR. Recent/current/upcoming venues for Foy’s poetry and prose include The Offing, Defenestration, Tough Poets Review, and Syncopation Literary Journal.