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Showing posts with label majority. Show all posts
Showing posts with label majority. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

THE NAIL DRIVER

by Tom Bauer
Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) announcement that he will vote against the Build Back Better Act rocked the political world on Sunday, with Democrats slamming their fellow colleague and Republicans celebrating the centrist senator’s decision, which effectively kills the party’s chances of passing the behemoth legislation. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said [Joe Manchin], the West Virginia Democrat is “gonna have a lot of explaining to do to the people of West Virginia” because he “doesn’t have the guts to stand up to powerful special interests.” —The Hill, December 19, 2021


Dooms the final plan with a nail, like Christ
was doomed, cross-wise, in plain view of all,
and also for the greater good of all.
There’s always a bad guy, the one to blame.
Is he the leader? He’s the visible one
making decisions for the ruling class,
the plant, the guy on the working-class team
who plays for the money team, the real team,
the ruling team with access to the rules.
Majority must mean majority of those
who rule the majority, because there’s no
majority of those who own the law.
We pray and bend our knees, but it is doomed,
and those few in control keep hammering.


Tom Bauer grew up playing violin and listening to spoken word recordings. When he was ten, he rashly announced he was going to be a poet. He did a bunch of university and stuff. He's had some poems published. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.

Tuesday, July 01, 2014

TIME TO PLAY OUR GAME

by Stephanie Sesic


Image source: Daily Kos


     (with apologies to Joe Raposo)


one of these things is not like the others
     the proud owners of glorious cocks
     beloved collections of parasitic cells
     corporations closely held as a clandestine lover
     cunts and the sluts who hoard them
one of these things just doesn’t belong
     you see men are only human
     the justice they invented embryonic
     while the money eats what it needs to grow
     from the body that belongs to anything but her


Author's note: Italicized lines are from theSesame Street song, "One of These Things," by Joe Raposo. 

Stephanie Sesic teaches English at Kent State University. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications, and her chapbook The Intimate Verge was published by Pudding House in 2008.