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He's part artist, part alchemist,
but a full-on con, self-professed with post-
graduate degrees in mixology
and the god-given sense to know which
smoldering home remedies will catch fire
(give or take an occasional legal glitch).

His healing pitch is grifted on the easy
comparison of queasily lowered brows to
their indistinctly raised betters. You'll doff
the scoffing face as he pulls back a masking
caparison, and your fever gallops hotly
hoof-in-mouth with an uncontrollable itch.

Tinctures, colloids, salves and potions,
they all have twisty caps, blithe boxes
bubbling over with hypnotic patterns
fashioned to cure your urge to avoid
his futility. First'll come the ******, then
the crumple followed by purse strings loosening.

Don't consider it capitulation.
His assortment of fluid manipulations
bear a singular branding at 100 proof,
and after the recommended daily dosing
(two jiggers with each meal), you'll feel
you're **** erectus made sapient.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Carlo C Gomez Aug 2023
~
Saturn Jupiter Mars,
three blind mice running
up the clock to find freedom.

starlight stairs in abyss,
cities of the interior ring
carry a dangerous cargo: citizens.

t-minus one/this is fear

I am no astronaut,
I'm a refugee, bleeding hands pressed
tight to the barbed-wired fence.

we play charades from the window,
lunar phases keening
in the tender light of these infant wars.

t-minus one/this is fear

farewell threshold on laudanum,
the grifted gift of the Joe Blakes
painted from memory.

the far off observation
telescoping my fear, leading me
to believe I'm hiding in plain view.
~
Carlo C Gomez Feb 2021
Sun comes up,
she goes down
on some upended main drag,
if i were an archaeologist
i still wouldn't dig this place,
every other day she dwells
in tedious, empty cafés,
but on the weekends she flashes
her "license and registration"
to oncoming traffic,
hoping for grifted furlough
to wear as silken, shiny beads,
and so we ride
this merry-go-round,
because moving in circles
is far better than being trapped in a square,
we've stopped climbing the calendar
in search of higher elevation,
she used to pour it on thick,
stirring drinks inside my head,
i used to shake
worries from her hair,
now with bitter orange marmalade
low in the sky, and stacked against us,
it's home before dark,
lest our eyes open wide to see
we are nothing more
but strangers at sundown.
Hound-dog swallowing poly-coated pills, filling up, bloated, falling off stage, and into a more permanent and lasting Graceland, to be surrounded by another’s verse.

I only enjoy what comes from my own head, a modern Samuel Johnson, no matter what happenstance brought about to be said, a cage free Bronson. Hearing false verse through a syllable count, hoisted onto adverbs easy to mount. Congratulate a lesser mind, reaching commonalities most could find. Ease in creation, opens floodgate doors, distributing specs of grace through misworded spores. Life, love, and the pursuit of vanity, leaves simplified lumps of prosperous thought riddled with anonymity. The invention of despair overwhelms those ungifted, and leaves them erecting stale forgeries they grifted.

In the wee small hours of escaping light, a crooner steadies his hands as he falsifies his originality, reading off the music from another’s sheet.

A change in topic is something to hold as worthy, though in a modern context of prosaic prose, such good fortune can be exceptionally elusive. Broken hearted symptoms shared through a hash-tag, rerouted and worded, to fit an illiterate youth’s lesser diction, reposted to approach validity, only to be called forth as an original soul, one to revere, and hold as an entitled fraction of logic.

The piano man knocks out a tune, hit in stride with vocal conduct, inspired and laid in pen by a lesser man propelled by better wording, given up for another’s career.

Market’s over-saturated with teenage sonnets, weeping over cut wrists, ended (Victorian inspired) trysts, refreshed and brought back around until sentimentality vomits. Themes used to run rampant with fresh ingenuity, made extinct, occurred in a blink; now every poem has some congruency.

The grapevine got entangled, getting involved with a troublemaker, providing the soundtrack, using another’s words.
eileen mcgreevy Nov 2009
The dinner was made, but something was wrong,
She tried to eat something, appetite, gone,
The view from the kitchen was a sky black and grey,
She got under the table to get out of the way.

Even moms home made cooking couldn't beckon her out,
For she knew fine and well, that a storm was about,
Such a crash, then a light filled the kitchen completely,
Then a hug from two arms,"Daddy please dont you leave me".

As her body was lifted to a warm loving place,
Daddy wiped away tears from her four year old face,
Then it seemed as though nothing could hurt her somehow,
Not the storm, not the flash, not the terrible howl.
As the storm grifted by, daddy hushed her to sleep,
Snuggles up with his baby,safe and warm for to keep.
Star BG Jan 2018
What happens when you take a child’s ear
and shape it with Poe and Shakespeare's talent?

What happens when one grows exposed to
delicate musical and grand memories?

What happens when child’s mind is filled
with great aspirations from knowledge of many topics?

What happens is...
a divine, sacred, smart and grifted poet,
meant to grace the world.

Meant to be an avatar in life.
carving other ears splendidly.
Inspired by Jeannie Kristufek Hawrysz a grand poet Thank you.
Caleb A Johnson Dec 2020
I tried once
To be what I am not
Gave myself a shove
Tried to be forgot
My shape shifted
And for a moment
I was grifted
I cannot
Be what I am
Not
One day I was fuming over the cruelty of the worlds barriers to success for those who genuinely want it, thought I'd change myself to make it. But then I realized, I am not that person and that was the source of my anxiety.
Rew Jun 2024
Yo!
What are you folks to him, you maga crowd,
you duped rioters, you duped stymied gop,
just a meal ticket, for crying out loud,

You, the soldier ants, right, right, beetle-browed
you desperate sad and blank-minded lot,
what are you folks to him, you maga crowd?

You, the grifted he leeched on, you, right cowed,
as long as you pay he cares not one jot,
just a meal ticket for crying out loud,

But sometimes Freudian truths ring out loud
"This Disgusting Sham Politician!! " what?
what, are you folks to him, you maga crowd,

Do you remember the deaths this thing allowed
" Stand back and stand by " at his riot,
what are you folks to him you maga crowd,

This creature will leech till you're in your shroud
Then finally over your grave will squat,
What are you folks to him, you maga crowd,
Just a meal ticket, for crying out loud.
line 11  Vivek Ramaswamy
Mitchell Nov 2020
We got there in the early afternoon
By a car low on gas and a bad back right wheel.
It was Thanksgiving, and I wrote.
My name down on the back of a Whole Foods receipt
Because I was having trouble remembering the
Double-clap and the lazy double L.

I have been trying to read more poetry.
And yet
My stanzas
Still come out like that.

The royal, we appreciate the energy.

There was my grandma's newly painted house.
There was my father, and I's grifted palm tree.
There were my uncle's five cars.
All parked on the ****-filled crack and mild sidewalk.
There was the sound of the neighborhood dogs.
All fighting for the honor of their owners
Who only really loved one-fourth of them.

I started to cry after I put the car in park.
I was terrified. This shocked her because I was one.
To only cry when I was really drunk.

"Are you really drunk?" she asked me, patting me on my back as if I was choking.

"I feel I'm saying hello and goodbye at the same time," I said.

Then I opened the door and said, of course not, not yet.

The gate was creaky, and the young black dog.
Was excited
Like they always were.
The one white one, the one my uncle got took from my neighbor,
Just stared at me with the absence of something.
That knew they wanted to love
But didn't know how to ask or even receive it.

My grandma wrapped up because of the wind.
She was all smiles as she talked about being ready to die.

Being forced to be outside in nature
Is not always pleasant, especially when the alternative
Is killing from an accidental posture.

I had two beers for the price of one.
And listened to bird sounds on Youtube.
That my uncle explained brought tropical birds:

"The really fancy ones," he explained.

Then he pointed to a dead pigeon a hawk
Had left the day before
And stripped me of my Esquire magazine perspective.
Of fancy
And recalled where the hell I came from.

For some reason,
I brought up Veterans Day.
A ripple of guilt
Snaked over the glass patio table,
Over the leek and chive stuffing,
The Pilsner beer,
The homemade cranberry sauce,
The too-thick gravy and the burnt turkey, only to land
On my uncle's ears, who said:

"Dad always told me, When I'm dead boy
You go and **** on my grave! Man like me
Needs a shower whatever way he can get!
"

I nodded as she winced, and grandma said nothing.
My dad was inside cooking as usual.
One of the dogs, the young small black one
Excitedly mounted the brain dead white one
And ****** and ****** until the black one realized
He wasn't ready for physical love.

An anecdote spilled out of my mouth
About how I traveled to Normandy and saw
Art of the boats and the men and he, my grandpa,
That drove on D-Day.

My tale fell on deaf ears.

"Yeah, I went to Dad's grave," my uncle said. "And I beheaded him and skinned him as he asked. The man had a lot of requests."

"No, he didn't," Grandma insisted. "He no do that."

"I put a new skin on him," my uncle assured her. "Ain't going to leave my man skinless."

We had bad pie and left ten minutes after.
We didn't hug, so don't ask.
As we waved goodbye, I noticed a smudge of food.
On my dad's bulbous gut.
He had been very excited about his new couch.

"It takes up the whole living room! You and your sister can sleep in every corner of the thing and not touch feet!"

I did not cry as I pulled into the street but
I wept at home
In the shower
Scrubbing away the off-chance or the possibility or the
What-if-I-did-this of that

Family-packed afternoon.
All the while acting as if the screams of ***** children were nothing but more "liberal noise" and "fake news," even as he compared Stormy to his daughter before sadly flopping around like the taco manatee he is.
He wasn’t just buddies with Epstein. He partied full-on eighties; piles of coke and champagne enemas with him. He lusted and wallowed literally in piles of scammed cancer patient and dying veterans' cash with him, and dismissed every underaged trafficked survivor. It doesn’t just read like a rap sheet. It reads like the collapse of accountability itself. Supreme Court sanctioned.

When you lay it out, when you really stack the bodies, the broken laws, the shattered norms, and the battered dignity of what little democracy we had — even Kristi Noem starts to look like a hollow-eyed lost uneducated voting farm mom with very poor taste, compared to this orange taco who set the whole house on fire and called it patriotism.

The magnitude is undeniable:

He didn’t just incite a riot. He summoned a lynch mob in Jesus cosplay, armed with bear spray, flagpoles, pipe bombs, zip ties, and impromptu gallows, chanting to hang his own boot-licking, robot, boy scout, carved out of driftwood, sad excuse for a committee-he-wasn’t-even-there-for Vice President.

He didn’t just steal top secret documents and billion dollar secrets people died to protect. He bragged about it. It’s all on tape. Listen to what he promised to donors, to foreign adversaries, to the highest bidders, like a doped-up power-drunk mafia Don showing off his stolen American trophies — souvenirs from the nuclear football.

He didn’t just commit fraud. He built a branding empire on defrauding hard-working Americans, from that fake university he created to a charity that stole money from veterans and dying children with cancer.

He wasn’t just buddies with Epstein. Underage girls screamed and pleaded to not have to be next. All lost into the void of wealth and power. Literally trapped on an island. At least Epstein did the right thing.

He wasn’t just found guilty of defamation twice. He was found to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, and then lied about it so cruelly and so often the courtroom flinched. Jurors literally vomited.

He wasn’t just impeached twice. He was never even held accountable because too many senators were too afraid of losing Facebook likes from suburban militias.

He didn’t just fail upward. He left claw marks on democracy as he rose from bankrupt casinos and rotting steaks.

Let’s not forget:

He defrauded us, the broke-*** taxpayers, for hundreds of millions while we post fake photoshopped Facebook pics of our imaginary lives in which we pretend we aren’t just serfs and slaves to the dollar.

He bilked donors with fake matching fund scams.

He grifted off a deadly pandemic.

He sold hats and gold-plated Bibles while bodies literally piled up in every third-world country. Stack upon rotting stack of them.

He called fallen soldiers like people I served with “suckers and losers.” "What kind of idiot gets caught or becomes MIA?"

Then he ordered us tear-gassed. Us, peaceful protesters. And for what? For a failed photo op with a smoking Chinese-made Bible he’s never even read.

He threatened journalists, judges, and witnesses by name, their kids and families.

He tried to extort Ukraine for political dirt and is now trying to give it to his hero Putin.

He pardoned war criminals — literal rapists and alleged cannibals.

He turned the DOJ into his personal vindictive hate-fueled legal team, bent on revenge.

He promised revenge on all political enemies and is working on it.

He plotted to send tanks into American cities to crush people with no trial or due process like his hero ******.

He encouraged people to inject bleach or just drink it.

He said ****** “did some good things.” He said racist killer mobs were “fine people.”

And yes — he fathered Eric, who scares even his fellow coked-out zombie beavers.

He lies to the whole country again and again with no compunction. Not just about an election he undeniably lost while whispering to oath-breaking cowards to “just find 11,780 votes.”

He screamed “fake news” at the sounds of ***** children, compared Stormy Daniels to his daughter, before flopping around like an electrocuted taco manatee, bragging then crying over his gold toilets — the taco manatee of late-night infomercials, Pepsi spots, Pizza Hut and more — the collection plates full for authoritarianism.

He wallowed in cash with billionaires and traffickers, while everyday people chewed on fluoride-free ketchup packet soup made from fast food salt single-serves and apologetic acid rainwater.

He told coal miners he’d bring back jobs, while he deregulated their protections and sold off their futures for an immediate infusion of pennies on the dollar, which he squandered trying to pay off **** stars and *** workers behind his heartless wife’s cold, unloving, robotic back. Guess that's better than having another one pushed down the stairs again.

He killed the lunch programs. Then mailed postcards to the kids' families he helped starve, addressed to the ones already gunned down at school during recess.

He said he’d “drain the swamp,” then drained our global economy with insider trading like Martha Stewart at a Snoop Dogg ****, then baptized himself in the orange glowing filth.

This is the man who turned grievance into a sacrament, white supremacy into a ballot strategy, and cruelty into offshore taxpayer-funded currency scams.

This is the man who made Kristi Noem — at least she only shot a puppy.

Trump didn’t just break laws. He is the rotting carcass of Clarence Thomas Winnebago accountability, draped in a poorly tailored flag and Rudy’s spray-tan runoff.

Please tell your kids why they only get half a doll and half a school day.

Tell your daughter why her broken childhood is a “patriotic sacrifice.”

Tell the bodies in the gravel pits, in Ukraine, the self-aborted **** fetus in the back alley dumpster why we called this “greatness.”

Or maybe just admit:

The poets didn’t ruin America. The Christo-fascists did. And they did it with a smile, a red hat, and a Golden Bible full of blank pages.

The shameless uncaring pandemic grift — there’s more to mine:

His deliberate downplaying of COVID while privately admitting its lethality. He got the best care though when he got it, on the taxpayer’s dime of course.

Mocking masks while people suffocated on inadequate, underfunded ventilators.

Forced unwanted “super-spreader” rallies held with full knowledge of their danger to the obese and elderly that died as a result.

All the while profit-promoting quack cures and undermining professional career scientists, leading to thousands more easily avoidable deaths.

Bodies piled in freezer trucks — he called that a hoax. My uncle wasn’t a hoax. My neighbor, nor my childhood friends. He used their deaths as another twisted campaign strategy.

He held rallies not despite the danger, but because of it, to spread it. Feeding a martyr complex to the uneducated, unfaltering cult faithful. Making the morgue a loyalty test.

His lies weren’t just political. They were epidemiological ****** warfare.

Countless — literally uncounted — children in cages.

Millions spent separating scared, confused children from their parents, some of whom were never reunited even today.

Locking toddlers in cages under foil blankets.

Promoting a system that was losing track of hundreds of children in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic abyss.

He asked for votes over tearing families apart at the border and called it justice.

They caged infants beneath aluminum sheets, trauma-wrapping toddlers while TV pundits shrugged.

Some kids vanished into paperwork and shadows. No names, no faces — just starving, traumatized, nameless ghosts in a broken, heartless system.

Then the constant environmental ****.

Not only the flaming sinks and contaminated rivers, but even more coal deregulation — but there’s more.

Opening sacred tribal lands for drilling.

Gutting the EPA.

Selling off national monuments for extraction deals.

Ignoring climate collapse in exchange for small, meaningless, short-term temporary profits.

He stripped the Earth like it owed him rent.

Pried open sacred tribal burial grounds with corporate drills.

Turned protected lands into sacrifice zones.

Signed deals in boardrooms lit by wildfires, laughing while the oceans burned and washed their dead onto the beaches — wave after poisoned, overheated wave.

He banned trans troops from serving.

Rolled back healthcare protections.

Enabled a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and violence.

Appointed judges hostile to marriage equality and basic human dignity.

He didn’t whisper hate. He ensured his hate-filled, brainwashed cronies codified it.

He didn’t ignore trans lives. He erased them in pages of senseless policy.

He armed the bigots with hate laws, lit fires beneath pride flags, and gave the pulpit to now-known and convicted Catholic priests and other child-molesting preachers who called consenting adult love a “sickening sinful disease.”

SCOTUS corruption and the theocracy agenda.

Like Anita Hill — we must always name Clarence Thomas brilliantly, and to the broader point:

Amy Coney Barrett was laughably forever seated just days before a critical election.

Stacking our courts with impossible-to-remove, mentally sick, and power-hungry religious extremists.

SCOTUS helped dismantle rights, pretending not to be political while they continue, to this very second, doing the bidding of billionaires and evangelical overlords.

He helped turn robes into vestments, gavels into crucifixes.

Rushed the sick sad **** Barrett through like a sermon before the offering plate. This guy was the class name taker and tattle-tale. No one’s peer or equal   just a sad, sick, revenge-bent **** lusting for pain and power.

Made the highest court a cathedral for plutocrats and prophets, where the Constitution burns beneath the Book of Revelations.

Media control and cult dynamics:

Turning Rupert Murdoch’s ******* named Fox News into a state-sanctioned and fully funded five-times-a-day sports scores and soundbites brownshirt propaganda wing.

Cultivating “alternative facts” through social media disinfo.

Demonizing truth itself to build loyalty through censored movies that don’t even align with or reflect their sad, sick agendas but co-opting them anyway and giving it away to lowest earners that can’t afford cable news and don’t hold library cards but have all the episodes of The Apprentice on VHS.

He is, every day, trying to turn truth into an unpatriotic traitor.

I am a veteran. I fought. I bled. He did what? Get another handy after a massage in a tennis resort in spoiled, pampered New York?

He built a doctrine of lies so thick, people prayed in memes and bled for hashtags over him.

He birthed a cult with red hats and martyrdom complexes, where facts go to die and grievance is a bedazzled grandma tote bag and visored gospel.

January 6 aftermath — not just the riot:

Pledging to pardon entrenched, psychotic, bomb-building, gun-hoarding insurrectionists.

Calling them “hostages.”

Still drunk on the blood spilled that day.

Describing those jailed for violent sedition as “the real patriots. All the rest of you are too lazy or stupid to fall in line with.”

He didn’t just incite a coup. He sold the gaudy merch off it.

He raised money on policemen's spilled blood, called terrorists “tourists,” and promised their perpetual freedom.

He made sedition a subscription plan, and treason a campaign slogan.

Women’s rights and abortion.

Grabbing them right by their *******, for America, to show his daughter how to lead by example.

Overturning Roe v. Wade via the judges they seated. It will lead to real-world deaths of millions of women denied basic health care.

Trigger laws activating across red states, dragging us back centuries.

He didn’t just overturn Roe. He unstitched time.

Dragged women back to back alleys and whispers.

He handed scalpels to zealots in robes, and watched the nation bleed, smiling like a man who thinks pain is purity. And **** and ****** is your fault, because life begins at *******.

— The End —