Demos Crassly

Demos Crassly

Who didn’t know this President-Elect, executing out of his depth

Was doomed to fail for lack of analysis and organization,

Fair-for-compromise finesse, hydra-headed care-n-vision to repair?

If his depth were a skyscraper, then his predecessor’s was the clouds,

Where from that awesome height the souls of men are weighed alive.

Obama’s walking past the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard,

The Government Studies Department, The Schools of Law, Business,

and Medicine, The Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the Economics laureates

Crossing the Freshman Yard, and – alas – even the Graduate School

Of Divinity. And then this guy in his hard hat, developing casinos in

Atlantic City. Shell-gaming unions. Starring on kitsch TV! Slipping a

Handshake to foreign biznicks of dubious d’stink. Tweeting Mar Lago . . .

How a country of low whites, with their reflex distaste for the intellect,

Could be sold bartered business banter – as if the Dome of the Congress

Dare not acclaim St. Paul’s. As if the White House could a country club.

Right there in the Harvard Course Catalog, says Government is an

Art & Science. Right there in the Washington, D.C. census, says

Hundreds of thousands of good men and women, patriots a’plenty

Turn on their car ignitions each a.m. to fight the good fight in the bureau-

Cratic way that is as the cells and vascular system of the animate body.

The subways, the tunnels of The Pentagon, the miracle-marveled corners

Of The Smithsonian Institution, begging a genius to understand each glass case.

The Oval Office is a Cancer Institute of America, intaking fraught patients

Each day. Barak titrates DNA, as this clown scuds a scalpel. Those strands.

MJM 5/17 SF