Three Poems

by Brandon Marlon (July 2020)

Les Manifenstants, for L’Assiette au Beurre, 1904.

 

All the Rage

To protest police brutality and injustice,

I did what anyone occupying the moral high ground would do

and looted a 65-inch plasma TV from Target,

which should teach those uniformed brutes a thing or two

about the repercussions of systemic racism and

which looks frigging awesome in my living room.

You should have been there, the streets teeming

with the rageful fevered by smoldering resentment,

hooligans and gamines honorably rioting to resist inequality,

jiggering with padlocks, bashing in windows like a boss,

diabolizing law enforcement and sticking it to the man.

The sheer nobility of it all leaves me speechless, even now.

Sure, I heard afterwards that on the newscast

they described us as temerarious and foolhardy, but so what?

Hell, my own folks called us every name in the book:

hoodlum, scofflaw, scapegrace, malefactor. Big deal.

All I can say is that from now on I’ll be binge-watching

Judge Judy in high def, and they ain’t invited.

Main thing is, we made a strong statement and

let the establishment know what’s what.

Damn shame that an innocent victim had to die

just so my boy Mikey could finally lay his hands

on Playstation 4 but, shoot, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Maybe someday the utter unwisdom of it

will seep into our consciences and stir regret,

but don’t bet on it. Caring about and coveting

are two sides of the same coin,

and those of us short on coin

will take whatever half we can get, best believe.

Besides, there’s just something about tossing Molotovs

and committing arson that gets the adrenalin going,

know what I mean? I’d do it again in a heartbeat, because

Larceny and Pyromania Matter.

Anyway, it’s safe to say we put the cops on notice.

We run things, things don’t run we!

I love the stench of righteous indignation

in the morning, don’t you?

 

Leaves from Paradise

With their power, tradition holds,

Elijah the prophet cancelled

the poverty of Rabbah bar Avuha.

I would hand one to you, ma’am,

curing late-stage disease,

making a mockery of your prognosis.

Another would I offer you, sir,

and soothe your sorrows,

the aching loss of ones loved.

Friend, you’d take this from me

to erase resentments

corroding for decades.

One I’d reserve for you, dear,

effacing then replacing fears

with calming peace of mind.

Last but not least, just for fun, I’d give one

to the Angel of Death, who’d surely savor

a sublime whiff of bliss.

 

Election Season: Televised Debate

Only out of a sense of obligation did I tune in

to this seriocomic harlequinade, a banquet of bunkum

featuring ideologues slinging contumely,

making claims spurious if not specious,

gainsaying the accomplishments of their colleagues,

this one a scurrilous cur, that one ineffectual because effete,

the next louche and, per the tabloids, scabrous,

each flanked onstage either by an orgulous ogre

or a bilious churl with a vinegarish disposition

or a fatuous upstart belching talking points

or a hidebound establishment candidate

afraid of being worsted then ousted,

the lot of them treating us viewers as little more

than halfwits, mental pygmies too obtuse

to recognize piffle even in high definition

on a wall-mounted flat screen with the volume cranked up.

Shoot, I was glued to it for hours for the same reason

fans ogle pugilists bloodying faces for purses of cash:

any affray affords vicarious pleasure.

I was eager to see how it all went down,

to note with interest who would prove

exceedingly savvy or at least unexceptionable,

who would deliquesce in the spotlight

with the cameras and pressure on, what

special pleading took place, which contenders

would whipsaw the frontrunner.

All this is redolent of the Roman amphitheater:

you could almost taste the sweat of those clearly

circling the drain, desperate to avoid relegation,

and I felt willing and ready to garland the brow

of the impressive with fresh laurel.

In the event, I was exhausted by the hokum

that ultimately left me underwhelmed and instead

I recollected Incitatus, who in hindsight

and despite his classical equine countenance

increasingly seems as if he may well have been
at least as good a consul as all the rest, after all.

 

Table of Contents