[Newspoetry] Lotta's tromping on Grapes of Wrath

[Donald L Emerick]

Lotta'S trom.Ping on Grapes of Wrath

Someday I shall find out why
we have this clumsy phrase
of tongue: the grapes of wrath,
which is, I suppose, Biblical
because Greeks loved grapes
and they wrote a lotta the Bible,
or rewrote it, to please Greeks,
who had their own sense of logic
about how the world was done --
and, if so, and mind suppositions,
the Greeks knew their grapes well,
well enough to make Dionysius god,
over-rival to work-a-holic Appollos,
per Freddie Nietzsche's BirthDay song.

And, the next time I heard this phrase,
a few centuries had sprung past me,
when American Civil War was waged,
and some said that great war started
when a terrorist group seized a US fort
at Harper's Ferry, to get liberty's arms
for men willing to die for their truth --

but they failed to start the revolution,
they were caught; they were hanged --
and, smolderin' in de grave, dey go on,
for their angels tramp out the vintages
from where grapes of wrath are stored...

You see, I still know nothing of grapes,
these wrath-related grapes of Greeks--
but connections appear in our history
for Chronos waits centuries to move
some pieces while others smolder on.

And, so a few more years pass on by,
and the leader of Senate Republicans
says, "We proudly voted for ol' Strom;
none of dose troubles wudda happened
if everyone had done as we did in '48."

So I sees Ol' Trent still is smolderin'
about how de law enforces equality
between peoples of different races,
un I doan unnastan' why Ol' Trent
done went way from de Democrats
to da GOP what with Mistah Lincoln
being duh GOP slave liberator un all.

My eddicated frien' says inversions:
it's all inversions: A tries hard to be B,
un B tries even harder to be A, becuz
grass is greener on de udder sides,
they pass right through each other,
both alway tryin' to look like a party
smack dab in de middle where no one ever is.

Despite his denials, I still know Lott's mind,
I know how evil festers and corrupts a soul,
how a petty vengeful man is a great danger,
a much greater danger than other petty men:
a petty GOP party which enslaves workers
by destroying their common rights to bargain,
to bond in association with one another,
to demand fair wages for hard days of work,
to insist that wages be not robbed by prices
of supply-side monopolies and oligopolies,
for modern corporation is modern plantation,
meaning that it owes nothing to the slaves,
not even the alleged common decency
of caring for those who have born the battle
of struggling to make a go of bad-faith deals.

Corporations only rent slave labor by the hour,
so they owe nothing to any but slave owners
and to the highly favored few slave-masters
who run tenant-migrant-temporary labor camps:
so, as they do not care if millions starve in India
they also do not care if millions starve in Indiana:
that's not a problem that share-holders gave us:
already, we see what games corporations play,
by shifting production facilities from town to town,
insuring that taxes are shifted to the workers,
that pollution is shifted to the towns people,
and that none will say anything, nothing at all,
for fear the production plant will move elsewhere,
leaving older and abler workers unemployed,
leaving towns with debts on now idle facilities,
leaving air smelly, water oily, and dirt muddied.

The corporate wife, so rumor said, was a trophy:
she was not the first marriage, nor even a second:
but the gorgeous bimbo you bought when bored,
just because everyone else would be jealous,
as such a woman really meant nothing to you:
for that is the way that you like all relationships
of human beings to be: empty status symbols...

And, you wonder, then, I suppose, why I praise
the Greeks and their drunken Symposium parties
where pouring out the grapes of wrath was fun,
even if Socrates always got to sleep side by side
with best-looking, most-fair of the Greek youths
who came to taste fine wines in the four winds:
Ol' Trent, though, still would go stomping home,
smolderin' over imagined insults to his manhood:
underneath self-righteous is a smolderin' indignity,
imagined or real, but smolderin' as long as it hides,
ready to flare up, at in time, in a psychoterrorism.

I hereby advise the HomeLand Security Police
to arrest this Lott, and most of the GOP Senate,
to keep these terrorists from striking more terror
here in my heart, high in the middle of HomeLand,
when they, like Al-Kyduh, want to roll back history,
to serve ideals of racial-ethnic-cultural-cultic purity:
a terrorist must be, most of all, anti-cosmopolitan,
Thus, even many Senate Democrats are terrorists,
like Joe Lieberman who is a radical danger to us,
as NDLC (NewDemYoung Fascists Organization),
which Clintons both founded and both supported.

When you have rounded up all these usual suspects,
and quarantined them incommunicado at Guana-T-Amino
on nebulous charges that will never be prosecuted,
and, for which non-offenses, they'll never be released,
and they lie there, smolderin' in the grave of a prison,
I doubt you'll have the time or interest to bother me.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick
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