regular readers of this blog know that i spent the past weekend in a writing workshop with ellen bass, who is my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. during the course of it, i wrote a poem for john mccain, of all the unexpected things. and then ellen, at a bowery poetry club reading on sunday night, read a brand-new piece of hers called “cocktails for obama“.
here is that performance:
this is the piece that i wrote for mccain:
Straight-Talk Express
the centrifuge of your tiny mind has swiveled on its pivot and you rage
against the death of a decades-long dream. You’ve watched our desire
dwindle then shift: away from you, away, like a day-lily
folding itself closed against the coming dark. You have become dark,
a slug on the underside of rock, greeting daylight with a shiver
as you try and try to slither from its reach. No good.
Nothing’s any good now—the sickly neon word “defeat”
signals nightly from your dreams: it’s over now.
Gentlemen, please turn off your engines.
You never wake refreshed, not any more.
Slitting a grapefruit for breakfast, a tremulous hand
betrays you: blood on the linen napkin, blood on the thin
and brittle wife. She regrets marrying you and you,
wrinkling in a Gucci robe, regret everything.
There will be no bailout for you, John.
You are locked out of that white house now forever,
strangled at the end of your Alaskan bitch’s leash.
“My friends,” you tell us, “I am just like you. I will keep you safer.”
But already the auditorium is empty and the lights
have been turned down. Here I am, suspended at the midpoint
between pity and rage, a place where nothing like compassion
can survive. Would I want to feel that for you if I could? Summon
some catechismic reserve to watch your cracked old face with
a semblance of love?
I would like to say yes, but then I’d be a liar: just like you.
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