[Newspoetry] The Right Stuff

[DL Emerick]

Experience is a racial code-word today.
It's a neutral word on the surface,
As all racial slurs slide on thin ice,
Knowing that voters will break through,
Not to consciousness, but to prejudice,
In the name of a standard corruptly used.

But, experience can work the other way,
against the jostling insider crowd of Clintons,
longing to be boosted into jaded power,
a return from exile's vacation paradises.

Down on the rotting streets,
our jobs walk away from us, our homes disappear,
in financial rapes once called evil usury.
The New Democrats felt like old Republicans,
so little different were their words,
so unhelpful were their actions.

Experience to the working man
means widening wage disparities,
the opening of highways to foreign commerce,
the increasing concentration of wealth,
the further rise of rampant aristocracy,
the demeaning of pacific life,
reduced to nurturing soccer moms in SUVs,
and dads portrayed as bumbling idiots.

The mass media proclaim the message:
Homer Simpson is everyman,
Making a fool out of himself,
In patent schemes of drunken dreams,
A sucker born to suck on every minute,
As if there were nothing but placebos today,
glittery illusions on screen fields,
a succubus of some athletic pseudo-hero,
or mindlessness in some religious retreat,
as if such denial destroys realities.

Women, by contrast, are everywhere lionized,
As the dominant ones, as sexual predators,
As those who calculate uncertain emotions
As precisely as Einstein did the Universe,
And inculcate a nesting culture as caring.

Republicans offer us their indifference
As their sole appeal to male machismo --
Where it is everyman for himself, alone,
For every man is an island to them --
Their anti-whining byline could be touted,
"I'm screwed so why care about you?
Suffer it like a man, silently."

We need none of such experience,
To imply more of the same neglect,
More of the same invested pains,
Nor a fair share of later gains.