Rant: Mad As Hell

Rant: Mad As Hell  

There has been a mass shooting  
Here in the Midwest just now  
With regular tube-drivel preempted  
And the chyron flowing by  
With warnings of mass flooding  
Until 7:15 pm as we eventually return  
To regularly scheduled brainrot.  
 
Mass shooting. Mass flooding.  
Tell me Satan doesn’t have  
A sense of humor.  
 
Joe Manchin has just scuttled  
The Climate Change bill  
He himself negotiated,  
And his snarky little face  
Stares from the screen as if looking for  
Something which isn’t there.  
Perhaps his moral compass.  
 
Last night we lay in bed  
And through the split-bamboo blinds  
The sky looked like  
Russia bombarding Ukraine.  
I stood in the doorway  
And the sky was a perfect paparazzi  
Thor with his AK-47 owning the libs.  
 
The latest version of Covid  
Moves in miasmic clouds  
Through Magastan  
Mutating, marauding, murdering  
While preachers from Maga-pulpits cry,  
Wash yourself in the blood of the lamb  
And while you’re at it,  
Give us Barabbas.  
 
Even as young girls  
Crouch in alleyways  
Awaiting the coat hangers  
In the hands of deathmongers  
Capitalizing on opportunities.  
You got something against capitalism,  
Snowflake? Let’s see your I.D.  
 
My mother, sixty-five years ago,  
Received a commandment from God  
To kill my little sister,  
And I with childish  
Don’t-know-what-to-do  
Hid the knives at night,  
And had a hard time sleeping  
And prayed to survive the insanity.  
And did.  
 
It’s how I feel now  
With the national anthem  
Howled from (cough) patriot  
Throats ravished by  
Stop the Steal screaming  
And ravening on  
The body of Christ.  
 
Longinus-redux thrusts the spear-tipped flagpole  
Into that Galilean peasant’s side once again  
While the hoi polloi, the groundlings,  
The red-hatted lumpenproletariat cry,  
Jesus Guns and Babies  
With a subtext of  
Fuck the transgender kids.  
 
While the creeks run wild  
And water is standing in the yard  
And much of the country is in severe drought,  
Moral and otherwise.  
And our daily mass shooting  
Has been put to bed  
With empty prayers  
And something-gotta-be-done.  
While 60+ Uvalde good guys with guns  
Through (cough) incredible bravery (HA!)  
Managed to survive the latest  
Maga-lover bad guy with a gun.  
With only 19 kids and teachers killed.  
Only.  
 
Thoughts and prayers  
And it coulda been worse  
From a blood-bathed NRA  
Sorry Not Sorry playbook  
 
To a nation struck dumb,  
Lame, with withered arms  
And Satanic dogmatics howling  
From their double-wides  
And lepers begging on the streets  
And jails overflowing  
And Joe Manchin grinning now,  
As it all comes crashing down in slo-mo  
Like a Jenga Tower of Babylon  
With nary a Zelensky in sight.  
 
Otherwise all is well.  
 
 
Written 17 July 2022