with thanks to W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,”
I sit here in a room
With my cable news and my Zoom
And I dream someone will declare
It’s safe to breathe the air.
Yet should we not have known
It would come to this
Nightmare of the Narcissist.
Wasn’t it all there in his book
The so-called Art of the Deal
He wins and looks good
And we pay for his meal.
Who begins a campaign
By descending golden stairs
Such a person a ‑President?
The brands and symbols, the broads and crooks
And the ever-present “What me?” look
Should have made it all so evident
The coming crime against Democracy
Though he came of age with Camelot
How did this one emerge so dangerously off?
The parents who raised him, the teachers who taught
The friends he horsed around with
Didn’t any of the them see
The only question he will ever ask is:
What can the country do for me?
The man who dabbles in casinos and hotels –
Where people visit yet never dwell -
When the journey of life is an airplane trip
And love is at best a goodbye note and a tip
How could he ever understand relationship?
Let alone the annals of the poor or the crimes of race
And thus the nation ends up sheltering in place.
Look at all his predecessors
Celebrities and Ego hogs wrapped in three decades
Of inward thought, what the haters and the pundits
With their microphones had wrought
Demonizing the Other, and the Self is always Boss
It’s no wonder he’s so utterly lost
The Apprentice of hot air has become the King of Ventilators
Who denies his people while adoring his hair.
When you preside over the Land of the Free
Without a jot of history or empathy
And day in and out your only role
Is to feverishly check the polls
Is it a surprise he’d one day preach,
My people, help my numbers, why not try the bleach?
So it has really come to this
The Nightmare of the Narcissist
Yet here’s what he doesn’t
Know about us, this oh so stable genius
Though we are isolated in our homes
Unlike him, we are not alone
And in offering this note
That is perhaps all I mean
We need periodic reminders
We have exited his dream.
Ted Littleford