Putin’s Puppet: A Poem
https://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2021/02/book-review-of-puro-chicanx-writers-of.html?fbclid=IwAR27O1CoFuQYOrLCM4hGMbjX9uCCbKaXcsSUoSzH62FCmhxMvcj0ndzSKHM
For my readers here:
[Xicanisma[1] Prophecies Post-2012] Putin’s Puppet *
is not Aryan (or a golden-hair-Thor) but through & through as close
to yellow as it gets.
A flim-flam man claiming billions no one sees.
He & the Czar
had a chat at the Ritz, in a bar,
over Red Bull, vodka, coke and complimentary chips,
served up by naked women who took American Express and rubles in I.O.U.s.
One rat said,
You take the East. I’ll snatch the West.
It’s all for the taking for swine like us and our friends
(ha-ha,
like ‘we’ have friends), rapacious and sly,
unconcerned with who or how many die as we take the planet. Don’t worry, man.
Forget
the jaundiced Chinese & ‘Rocketman’ (we’ll send to the moon.)
France can eat escargot. Palestinians must go. We’ll suck the earth dry. You & I,
pillage until we are down to two. We’ll compete for the universe.
Fair enough? (Haw, one said. As if we define fair by anyone’s terms.)
I, the poet rest my head on a pillow or a rock, the throb is the same,
my brain doesn’t stop a slideshow of doom.
viewing Dr. Strangelove scenes,
reruns play & no new plots.
No breathtaking aerial shots—
Aston Martin racing along the coast toward the villain’s hideout.
No soundtrack. (We are silent, not censored, not yet.)
No scientific facts in this version of a world for the taking.
No historical reference without revisiones…
(No Spanish or you may be arrested.
They are watching, legions in camouflage,
hoods or riot gear,
ready to take you out.
On your mark.
get set.
Putin’s Puppet doesn’t read books,
see films, listen to a symphony (or even the Top Twenty.)
He doesn’t look at art.
Instead, he shuts beauty down,
the big man on campus with the loyal fraternity.
Putin’s Puppet knows one color, said his son–green.
I’ll disagree. Putin’s Puppet does see color and it revolts him.
Blacks belong in Africa, he opines, and Muslims must stay in the Mid-East.
Mexicans are the scourge.
Like with his father,
his father before him and so on. Race serves one purpose–
servitude or genocide.
As for women–
you kill a rhino for sport or for its horns.
[A woman is worthwhile only if she enhances
your environment.]
How did we get here? How did we, indeed.
Not without concessions, not without greed. Down the rabbit hole
the nation went into Wonder-less slime.
We are in it deep this time.
When I can’t sleep, I spot the devil pissing in the dark.
I’ve lost feeling in my hands and feet.
I am an indian woman off the reservation,
as they say in racialist double-speak.
We do have reservations for the original peoples of the land.
Take a moment to think on that.
(2017)
[1] I coined the term Xicanisma in the 1980s as Chicana activists and scholars began to form our own feminism. It was discussed at length in by book, MASSACRE of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. UNM Press, 1994,20th Anniversary Ed., UNM Press; 2014, NM)
*Both poems appear in forthcoming collection, MY BOOK OF THE DEAD (UNMP, September 1, 2021, Abq., NM) Two Men and Me, Pushcart Prize nominee first appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal.