Poetry
Photo by John Kostyk on Unsplash
Georges On My Mind
(Impressions after seeing Ken Burns’ six-part documentary The American Revolution on PBS)
Quill-feathery high-minded rhetoric declaiming
on life liberty … well … try pursuing happiness
if you’re woman if you’re enslaved or poor
unpropertied or indigenous facing genocide.
Militias marching against the crown’s taxation
the redcoats’ military occupation subjugation.
Muskets popping rip-roaring canon killing
maiming bloody blood-thirsty bleeding brutality.
There’s rape of course always rape in war
and the dead and the dying from diseases
and the murderous hanging of neutral Quakers
— that’s right you’re either with or against.
Enemies allies loyalists rebels heroes traitors
divisive chaotic vicious selfish sacrificial
soldiers shivering starving unpaid for months
politicians meeting maneuvering scheming.
It’s a tale of two Georges posing paternal
one claiming royal rule over far-flung empire
the other wealth from his enslaved and theft
from native land … when he’s not losing battles.
One called king of others’ mother country
one acclaimed sire of the infant nation.
These damn colonists want to do their own
damn colonizing and they want it real bad.
(She Left Him for) A Chevy Suburban
She didn’t leave him for an uptown man
or downtown woman
or out-of-town job
there was no family call of duty out of state.
She left him for a Chevy Suburban
a tricked-out-like-an-RV used Chevy Suburban.
It was something that Chevy Suburban
something that would take her elsewhere
to Chicago and Toronto to Santa Fe and L.A.
— lots and lots of different elsewheres
it was something that Chevy Suburban
something to live in sleep in eat in anytime anywhere in.
She didn’t leave him for another man
She didn’t leave him for no woman
She left him (and her 9-to-5 cubicle) for a Chevy Suburban
Wait … She left him for a Chevy Suburban?
She left him for a used thoroughly used Chevy Suburban
A grit-gray gas-guzzling thoroughly used Chevy Suburban.
To take her away away from judgmental angst-ridden him —
who in 18 years went from Mr. Right to Way Too Uptight
She left him for a Chevy Suburban
left him feeling like a sad sad sack such a sorry sight
well that Chevy Suburban would never snap at her snoring
nor compose odes to a long-dead ex nor start a fight at first light
would never expect her to be a gettin’-high-on-weed jazz lass
or a San Fran baseball fan nighttime bleacher bum freezing her ass.
So she left him for a big old ugly thoroughly used
grit-gray gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban
left him flat just like that left him flatter than a roadside flapjack
’cause he was a way-too-uptight Mini Cooper kind of man.