Vote Your Interest
Let’s workshop this poem where the protagonist does not find it easy to "vote his interest" (since the party who harmed him gives him a safety net as well as a means to make people pay for the harm)
Vote Your Interest
The democratic party, decades back
exhorting him (through scarved whites)
to put in art his broken-home anxieties
about survival in a factory-ghosted city
of violence and drugs and depression
(instead of bullying classmates), now
pushes the very antiart cancel culture
that deleted him without due process
from his against-all-odds profession
as a university professor—deleted him
on kangaroo-court grounds that his art
“might trigger vulnerable populations"
(especially coming from a painter of his
“patriarchal optics”: white and male).
And yet the democratic party, the one
long opposing the other’s disposition
toward art-class-defunding insistence
on “activities more socially responsible
than painting and poetry and music,”
defends the very EBT and Medicaid
that now not only lifelines him afloat,
but also allows him to punish everyone
(although, yes, much less effectively
than were he to block highway traffic
like protesters)—tax-punish everyone
for enabling, if only by not standing up
to that minority of bullies behind it,
our reign of terror against expression.This piece is unpublished
Photo: colorado.edu/music/2022/02/03/student-life-advice-futurebuffs
Note: while I associate the attached face with a face of "pure evil," I don't know who the hell that person is. She could be great and all about free artistic expression. Indeed, I think she is a musician (so perhaps likely she is).