I Do Solemnly Swear

Oath of Office

Melania or Barron, maybe old Joe Biden

will be standing by with a bucket to douse

the Bible left burning with a touch of evil.  

faith

Gettysburg Address

A diaspora of stones make their way back, posted

by penitents keen to relieve long years of suffering. 

Late at night under desk light they put pen to paper,

insert shims of confession to wedge bits of Pennsylvania

scree into envelopes, a wary eye on talismans cocooned

in twists of tissue or sealed up tight inside zip lock bags,

ancient Alleghany seabed pocketed one hot August

afternoon in the Peach Orchard, palmed on impulse along

Cemetery Ridge, another bearing the mica glint that drew

the eye of a desultory adolescent moping in the long

shadow of Little Round Top twenty-three summers gone

now, before the untimely death of a sister or a budding career

in HR derailed on the heels of divorce, DUI and depression. 

How else to explain the plane crash, forfeiture of assets,

the shadow on the x-ray, the second one hundred year flood? 

In after hour twilight, tour buses long gone, gaudy chains

out on Route 15 humming, all with waits of an hour or more,

a National Park Service Ranger, a man about my age and mien,

doffs his flat brimmed lemon squeezer to retreat behind a desk,

leaf through a sheaf of petitions for mercy addressed in desperation. 

Silence pressing in from Culps Hill and Devils Den, the Wheatfield

and Seminary Ridge, he presses smooth a pane of stationary, eyes

closed, fingers brushing words of intention, box of stones at his feet,

heaped, indistinguishable as an unbroken line of advancing infantry.  

Good Nyet, Trumputin

Good Nyet, Soon

Sad late night Tweets

Staged comings and goings

To and from the tower

On Fifth Avenue

Red hat, white hat, ducks ass

Hair-do, sinister Kubrickian sons

The daughter of his darkest fantasies

Pay no attention, shiny surfaces blind

Us to henchmen nominees

Foreign creditors and deals done

In the shadow of onion domes

The Constitution assaulted, old girl

Humped and humiliated as if

She were Miss Paraguay or

A high end St. Petersburg call girl

No, keep your eyes on the prize

Investigations and charges

Corruption in high places

Discovery and deposition

Congressional hearings and maybe,

Just maybe, our old pal impeachment. 

revision

Lines Laid Down By Others

Days of measles spent cloaked in twilight

Veil of curtains and dime store sunglasses 

Between me and a sun gone dark with evil intent

Hell bent on robbing me of sight while I was busy

Looking inward tallying up the wages of sin

Bedeviled by an itch that needed scratching

Hands sheathed in white tube sock condoms  

To ward off nails rendered poison as the fer-de-lance

Snake that glared back from a steamy jungle

Overlay in the World Book Encyclopedia

Slammed shut for the sanctuary of my coloring books

Prophylactics and perpetual twilight incompatible

With proper grip and slow waltz of a crayon 

But the germ of a lifelong unwillingness

To stay inside lines laid down by others.