Three Poems Against Tucker Carlson

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