Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Mother Goose Mercenary Rhymes
with visual poems by Janet Kaplan
l. Cooked Goose
What’s good for the goose
Is better for the gander.
ll. Doggerel for Dog Days
Trumpy Drumpy built a great wall.
POTUS Trumpy made a huge fall.
All the GOP voters and all the sad Dems
Could not put America together again.
lll. State-ship
I saw a shipwreck drifting,
A-drifting on the sea,
And oh, it was all burdened
With bankruptcies for thee!
There were black men in the pens
And trans in the hold;
The oars were made of Glocks,
And the pols were made of gold.
The eleven million undocs
That lived under decks
Were eleven million brown folks
With chains about their necks.
The President was a fake
With law suits on his back,
And when the ship began to sink,
America said, “Quack, Quack!”
IV. T’was Night Before Armageddon
(With thanks to Clement Clarke Moore)
T’was night before Armageddon when all through the land
not a Senator was stirring, not even a Dem.
Many teleprompters had been set up with care
in hopes that the President soon would be there.
The voters were crammed together in their beds
while porn pix of Melania moaned in their heads.
Republicans in mansions and I in my home
were accounting taxes for audits that’d come,
when out in the White House there rose such a clatter,
I sprang from my desk for CNN on the matter.
Away to Rachel Maddow my remote then turned,
to Fox, back to MSNBC it churned.
The dawn yet to draw on Washington showed
in neon lights a sickly green luster that glowed,
when what to my affixed horror did appear
the Cabinet of the POTUS’s reigning dears,
and an orange mop head so twitchy and dumb,
I knew in a moment he must be the Trump.
More cunning than foxes his advisors they came
when he tweeted, shouted, and called them by name.
As New Orleans that before Katrina had flood
when levees were patched up with sandbags and wood,
so sat these by the nation’s nuclear football
with Federal budgets stripped from us all.
Then over the muzak I heard fumbling bumps
of enraged little hands twiddling their thumbs.
As I drew in my breath and was saying a prayer,
on the screen Donald shot up with a bound. There
he was, dressed, in a business suit, Italian-made,
a tie from India, and eyes in French shades.
A bundle of mortgages he flung on the table,
triumphant at bankruptcy, proudly culpable.
His eyes—how they reddened! His mouth how sullen!
His cheeks like un-risen cross-buns that had fallen!
The comb-over on his brow was held high with gel.
The puffy orange hair weave hid his cracked bell.
He raised his round face. His short stubby fingers
shook at the cameras like octopus stingers.
He was pumped up, plump, a right nasty alt shit.
I choked when I saw him as if by a bat bit.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
gave me to know I had everything to dread.
He laid his finger aside of the button,
then giving a nod, pressed down like a hard-on.
He sprang to the smartphone, to his team sent a twitter,
before TVs blacked out through America.
I read his tweet as I was falling down numb,
“It was YUGE, TREMENDOUS, SIMPLY A GREAT BOMB!”
Ode to Joy
That dark brush, strokes harsh, almost broken,
the music of the spheres counterpoint.
The anti-all, semitic, black, brown,
nuances of shades, the authority
of god the father, having killed off
the holy spirits of those who have
nothing, those who have no one
now the anti-all has all of us
similarly anti-.
Is anti
a noun, a verb, an adjective,
or does it add to noun, actor and action,
victim, antagonist?
I am Antigone,
unable to anti- with an i or anti
with an eee, conjoin anti-anteee,
not bipolar but single in grammar.
No activism but in collectivism.
I’m never collected, seldom active,
hardly ever passive. Am I
operating outside of grammatical
sense, never a sentence, phrasing
through days in lines of poetry?
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with crazed cellos,
violas, crashing tumbrils of
revolutionary zealots’ hallelujahs
to harmonies despite disjunctions,
wordless, the music of the spheres
prevail anti-tyranny.