Bent like a crooked hook, my old body falls apart

The grocery bags are scratching the ground

Arms weakened by muscle-mass loss abound

Lady walking ahead has a bargearse fart

From too tight pants that value a butt-crack

Short legged with tattoos ending higher forever

A pigeon walks like a distinguished drunken hack

Comes man in black — lorikeet on shoulder

A bird that constantly speaks its mind

In birdsong full of expletives and horrendous puns

The bread shop smells of hot butter buns

A dry-cleaner effluxes trichloroethylene in kind

Temperature is strangely balmy in this dream

At the best corner for best of average planets

Twenty-one degrees in this shady city of Ganetz

Two roads cross and split like a rainbow beam

Into gentle slopes of old crumbling homes

A dispirited Spring has turned into Autumn

With only one day of summer maximum

People about like ants on sunny stones

Our bourgeois happiness stolen from other lands 

By our grand masters of war with marching bands

Elected to hide with pride our hellish hostilities

The despair we inflict to feed crumbling industries 

With plunder, explained slavery and slow death

They corral us, like cattle in milking sheds

To control epidemics and invented diseases

Profiting factories of their untested vaccines

Joy to all this, it’s the price for the pork pie

On the strange planet with mad people who die

Home to some souls who practice flagellation

As a way to gain the next heavenly frustration

A weird planet where convergence of quaint luck

Gave itself the luxury of screwed up conscience

That turned into lonely madness for the lack

Of a single cosmic sign announcing the next entropic defiance

Afar by billions of years, too soon for god’s eternity

Saved by god to make America great again

Claims a modest Donald as we feel pain

God is a sadistic sermon that makes sure misery 

Is central to our angsts and joy a fleeting delusion

Where Americans believe America matters, in vain

A miserable speck of dust amongst infinite glittery

Unlucky, those with no life-jacket will die more

Those with floaties might make it to the shore

Guarded by barking dogs with medals and guns

An odyssey of refugees under a million suns

God hates you as his chosen next victim

Compassion is a disease that creates equity

Against divine and demonic suffering given generously

You are a passing-by failure with no points to redeem.

The rainbow bird constantly speaks its mind

In birdsong full of expletives and one horrendous pun

The Donald has won and people are in a bind

An alternative could not have been worse or dumb…

Could it, in a dream?

ROBERT URBANOSKI — 7 FEBRUARY 2025