Inauguration Day Poem 2025

*January 20 Martin Luther King Day*

.

Raise your right hand and swear

you won't forgive yourself, DJ,

for the 34 counts of felony

that would keep a Black man

from voting in Florida,

but which saw you sentenced

to nothing zilch nada hot air.

.

Raise your right hand and swear

that you'll keep your hands off Greenland;

won't use a MOAB on the tunnels of Palestine,

like some kid trying to blow the red ants to kingdom come;

will kill yourself if we have another pandemic;

promise you won't abolish education;

won't reduce America to an Idiocracy;

promise you'll double the Jan 6 insurrectionist sentences,

so they learn how the banality of authoritarianism works;

swear you won't swipe Canada or invade Mexico;

pledge that you will leave your myriad rape victims alone;

swear you'll never host SNL again,

although we hope you are roasted every day of your presidency;

look America in the eyeball and tell us

what Cofer Black is up to at Burisma,

and how the gas lines fit into the war with Russia;

promise you won't nickname RFK 'hoarse radish',

or start dressing him like Froggy from the Rascals;

if you gut the Voting Rights Act,

know we'll gut you, Rachmaninoff.

.

Christ, Almighty and whitey, and gristlestones, too

it's Martin Luther King Day

and we have to share his dream with you.

I have a dream that sees drones in the sky over DC that day,

and one, shaped like a little hand,

swoops down and grabs you, DJ,

by the man-p*ssy -- and everything --

and shibbers your timbers

a bespoke cruise missile

like the flying ginsu by Popeil

you sent to murder Soleimani,

and I hope you spend four years

duckrabbiting and Melania asks for a divorce,

and we know that if AGI happens this year

we'll all be hallucinating soon

and passing around postcards

of the hanging Mussolinis,

fascists beaten like pinatas by unresolved children

until the bullshit tumbles out

and someone has the good sense to plant a rose

in the loamy loam

of our certain doom