Great Again

A malignant tumor grows within us.
From our darkest pockets
cells of hatred multiply,
choking out goodness
and we shrivel like raisins in the sun.

It’s us against them, me against you.
People who didn’t know they were angry
but one taste of vitriol and they’re hooked,
sustained by the keystrokes of their Führer,
tiny hands punching out a new world order in 140 characters or less.

Divorced from humanity behind glowing screens, true colors come out,
refracting from different sides of the same political prism, combining in putrid brown.
An aunt unfriends a nephew on Facebook;
blood that ran deep has run cold.
They’ve never met this Chief Executive
but he drives his wedge between them,
turning a million rural aunts against a million urban nephews,
dividing & conquering a nation at war with itself.

Homeless don’t know where to sleep because everyone’s protesting in the streets
and there’s safe space for no one in America
where all lives matter and no lives matter
and everything is a shell of what it once was
back when things were better —
when was that exactly?

Chaos roars outside the window
while an elderly widow packs a little boy’s lunchbox for school
and rations her prescriptions for the month,
pained by the noise, and arthritis, and her progeny’s dried-up dreams.
He hugs her:
It’s ok, Grandma,
soon America will be great again.

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