Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone
We live under the heat dome.
I see you across the barren parklet.
You are eating bits of soft pink babies.
Humid.
My hair wilts.
Your curls frizz.
I lick the hot sauce off my fingers.
You yell that you are an arriviste.
I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.
You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.
You sing two registers too low.
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet.
Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.”
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.
The gloaming hour.
I leave a minute after you do.
You to your elevator shaft.
Me to my abandoned mine.
Dark. Wasteland.
We may meet again next year.
“Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”
— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse