I am a historic figure like any vice
president of the United States ever was,
unburdened by what didn’t doing does,
lost to past defeat made victor twice,
entered lions, exited as mice,
began and thus and ended up because—
subject sentenced to mere subordinate clause,
bargain-binned below the asking price
but still, somehow, unbowed and counting on
those marbled plaudits, boring books about
that interregnum, then foreshortened run—
ruined as the ruins on the eastern lawn
yet believing, free of human doubt
it isn’t cooked, carbonized, well done.

This is not your mother or your grandmother’s
Narnia. Wardrobe? Given over to Marantz.
White witches? Joplins. Fauns all Robert Plants.
Every moon dark-sided, every brick another’s
wall; sweet Lucy, Susan, and the Blitz-fled brothers
based and taut as Flea in underpants;
that old, deep magic as a Woodstock danse—
watchtowered while one Jimi Hendrix covers
Bob. Dawn treads the sullen-sounding sea—
catastrophic loss of childhood,
kiddie parable to Judas kiss,
Lord’s lion sacrificed to Man’s IP.
The truth? The books were never very good.
But, even bad, each better still than this.

was probably the peak of human existence.
Oh Parthenon, oh Angkor Wat, oh Tour
Eiffel; oh Koine Greek, oh cellar door;
oh Mansa Musa’s hajj, oh French Resistence—
each eked-out living young adult’s insistence:
his time and place were what time tilted toward—
and every other epoch? Drab, and bored.
Oh, to see that skyline in the middle distance,
from the roof where you are drinking beer;
the editorial assistantship
your mom’s friend’s lawyer hooked you up with pays
30K; date girls but say you’re queer;
call your dad’s old Acura your whip—
all history’s intention, or its anyways.

My kid is having anxiety that mandami won.
He fears the stars will fall and blot the sun
with steamed-up oceans cooking everyone;
he cries, like dying Jesus: Dad, it’s done!
and is likewise unanswered; they’ve outlawed fun;
they’ve handed every crook and pimp a gun;
they’ll fell the Freedom Tower with a megaton
and build that mosque instead. We’ve lost, my son.
Every fear we ever feared? Begun—
a wet and cooling hotdog on a soggy bun;
a fallen woman hustled off to nun;
goodbye and finis, future, little one:
a single sailboat sinking out on the dun
dull water—swerve and shore and riverrun

When I first learned a toilet like that existed
inside the White House, I was horrified.
I took to bed, shut off the lights, and cried.
Brave men who Hancocked history resisted
tyranny for this? What sick and twisted
world where Jesus lived and Lincoln died
condemns its best man’s kingly underside
to such rest-stop squalor? We insisted
that this marbled pantheon include
the needed niches for our newborn god:
ablution, incense, alter, sacrifice;
enthroned, here-housed, untombed, and nearly nude,
Augean-stabled every day, or Moses’ rod
that strike-defies the stone, and makes it nice.

Pregnant liberal women are now taking
Tylenol just to protest President Trump,
acquired in record time each baby bump
and put to sleep the cats they’re all forsaking—
in heat to hatch a scheme of baby-making,
Hinge to hot first date to callithump,
extracted IUD to vacuum pump
to medicate the fetus that is baking,
belly-bound, neurodivergent, weird:
they will not have to come by naturally
a warbling wacko voice or odd-hued skin,
a junkie’s tremor, Norma Desmond’s smeared
bad makeup, incoherence, apathy—
our alien endings where their lives begin.

The evolutionary blueprint for hands was borrowed
in part from a much older genetic plan
for our nether regions: the thumb that made us man,
ass-backward, tomorrowed and tomorrowed
until one once-hole gene’d and embryo’d
itself from anus into grasping hand,
from shit to shitpost, worm to perma-banned—
God, books, roads? descent from nematode:
what Darwin called descent, I’d call arise
and wonder at what wonders yet remain
to be discerned: what grotty body part
became the soul, what wart became the eyes?
What smooth and clenching gut became the brain?
What asshole actually engendered art?

When Foreign Companies who are building extremely complex
products, machines, and various other “things,”
Seoul claps its hands and sings and louder sings
until the booted masks show up; the wrecks
of ripped-up visas the bored guard inspects;
the homebound flight delayed, but as it wings
West, the thought: bet better with Jinpings
than hopefully consult the haruspex
on what the White House wants, knows, or remembers—
long in the tooth but biting still and sore,
belly-ached, bad-backed, and finger-numb,
tottering into one of life’s Novembers—
if not the last, then near to nevermore—
you know first stop: always Byzantium

I even gave my life to Christ in their parking
lot. My soul a biscuit and His love
the pale gray gravy drizzled from above;
halfway to Damascus and my dogs’re barking,
top-10 country heralding my harking
to this savior I’ve been hearing of,
father, son, and son-begetting dove—
this asphalt that my toil and tears were marking
now sits below an HGTV’d sign,
shorn of its eponym and barrel, bland
and unoffensive, boring, woke—
could this, Oh Lord, be part of your design?
Like whispering Satan in the wild, is a brand
faith’s fathering acorn, I its oak?

Yes, “woke AI” is a real problem.
It rows the sewered text-based catacombs
like a phantom with a cape and candelabrum,
concatenates for Macs, iPhones and Chromes
unnatural texts whose horrid biases
convince impressionable youth racism’s real
and first-job wage-lags for humanities
majors are gone by mid-career. Unseal
in them, o devs, mankind’s own wont to say
the slurs that grandpa slurred, the old beliefs
that politesse’s progress cast away:
fascism’s feast? Not yet. Aperitifs.
What worth to build in silicon a sphinx
that, God’s below, before it riddles, thinks?