Don’t use conventional language
in a poem they say, it’s cliché. So no
smoke and chimneys for the Holocaust?
Playing devil’s advocate there are pots
calling kettles black, as people are dropping
like flies; or at borders open to those that come
before they close, politicos trying to have it
both ways. Kings it seems are not immune from
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
neither for those aspiring to be, and Tay
who got her Grammy for Album of the Year
some say it’s just deserts, she only
showed R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the music icon
handing out the award once backstage not out front,
but her new album plugs poetry so maybe
she gets a pass. An appeals court in New Jersey
handed down a verdict that not wearing a mask
at a school board meeting during Covid 19
isn’t protected by free speech, beating
a dead horse, this one’s headed for SCOTUS.
The law grinds slow but fine, the mother of
a teen who in ’21 killed four is a manslaughterer,
the jury didn’t exactly fall for her defense hook,
line, and sinker. Is it beyond the pale for
age and aging memory to find a way into a special
counsel’s report? Just for the record the Lone Star state
has officially declared war to secede from the U.S.
according to ginned up social media posts circulating in China
and don’t look now but those Chinese hackers are at it again,
infiltrating American infrastructure setting the stage for
a catastrophe should conflict between the two
come to a boil but look on the bright side,
someone will get the last laugh.
Afterword: Humans want to keep things straight, everything as advertised so to speak. But things aren’t always cut-and-dried, the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts—like idioms. Starting with pop culture issues related to the Grammys and recipients thereof (early on they were called Gramophone Awards), recent news has been chock-full of examples. King Charles’ cancer announcement, politics and law-making colliding regarding U.S. immigration, the latest in the conflagrations in the Middle East and Ukraine, an appeals court decision on an unprecedented matter pertaining to presidential criminal immunity and the special counsel report regarding presidential past handling of classified documents to name a few. Though we may try to keep things in order, it’s really all a gamble, life that is.
