WHEN I HEARD THE FELON EX-PRESIDENT

After Walt Whitman

When I heard the felon ex-president vomit his sewage of lies,
when I saw that behemoth of untruth golden-calf brazen
before the television cameras,
when I felt the battering ram of that “passionate intensity”
breach the walls of reality,
when I watched that sea lamprey mouth suck
the nation into its vacuum,
and when I watched the sitting President gobsmacked
as though physically struck in the chest,
when I heard his hoarse voice falter before the onslaught
and lose the thread,
and I heard the fear of humiliation well up in his
bedeviling stutter,
and felt the spiritual terror of a Catholic boy 
in the presence of the Antichrist,
how soon I lost heart for the spectacle,
stood up, turned off the TV, and walked out
in the cool June evening where the fireflies
carried lamps of earth for us through the dark.

.

Thomas R. Smith
Art Luckypeach