REPLACEMENT: THE TUCKER CARLSON VARIATIONS
I
Tucker Carlson sold his heart
During a boring meeting in New York
Distant are the days when
He would watch goldfinches
In the 1970s La Jolla sun
Before he became “Tucker Carlson” on TV
II
He seeks a replacement
For his heart
But for now only has
The chittering laugh
Of a creature reeling yellow-eyed
Beneath a bad moon
III
Or Tucker's heart was lost slowly
Fading away reducing
Something vicious said for a dime
Something cruel ok'd in his mind
Always another ladder to scale
Or cracked bell to chime
IV
Tucker Carlson stays
One step ahead of something
He doesn't know quite what
Nothing a glib quip
A droll look cannot solve
He thinks
V
Or Tucker Carlson's heart
Suddenly vanished poof!
This can't be real he thought
Hearts don't
Just disappear
He thought
A GUY IN HIS LIVING ROOM WATCHES
TUCKER CARLSON ON TV
Here they come
Women and children marching
Down the dusty road
Fleeing one oblivion
For another
Riding on the tops of trains
Or inside boxcars
Camped out at a border
Waiting
Dislodged from history
Like tree branches broken off
And found on
The river’s edge
No climate-failed crops
No AK-47 Made In USA
No ballot box mishap
Or ambitious general
Trained in Georgia
Or coke sniffed in Manhattan
None of the Marine invasions
Stacked up in the 20th C.
Like a teetering tower of grenades
Is why this is happening
We are agents of history
We forge the new reality
Though the consequences
Are not ours
After each of our gestures
Of Odyssean will
Of commerce
The line of history is cut
We are beyond
The dynamic of return
This we deliver to them
To endure and grow stronger
It is like a gift in that way
To be more like us
We will turn them away when they arrive
Thirsty and worn by the elements
Each historical moment
Appears in the field of time
As a firefly appears in the night
Glowing and disappearing
Unbound and gone
TUCKER CARLSON IS TEARING DOWN
MY FATHER'S MIND
Tucker Carlson is tearing down
My father's mind
Hannity hammers holes in his heart
Laura Ingram lays laurels of ignorance
All around him
Dread brutes are they who say one thing
While they dig pits to bury the bones
Of the old Americans
They lead into the forests
Of charred tree desecration
People like my father
Who barely made it
Out of the 1940s
Sleeping six kids to a room
Skipping rent if it had to be
Roxbury Boston was too hot in the forties
He made it into his eighties
Now crazy men and women
Yell at him
In the Milwaukee setting sun
Saying they can make it right
They don't even know
What happened
