Gaslight: Inauguration Day
       

                                            My Movado stopped at 12:02
as the Slovenian First Lady
                                            waltzed with Lincoln's Bible

above the frothing camera
                                            crews, her steely mien unmoving
in the stew of eyes. Empty

                                            bleachers buttressed the slow
motion parade, and the fire
                                            trucks stalled. Mediocrity

flooded the National Mall.
                                            Inauguration Day, a young man,
arms outstretched, 100 stories

                                            above the city, on the Westgate
Bridge, held aloft by swirling
                                            blue police lights, determined

to suicide. The president
                                            declares that he alone can
repair the American carnage.

                                            Breakfast on the terrace,
my croissant writhed and
                                            began its buttered dive off

the deck. 20,000 riot cops
                                            practiced restraint as their
bloody fingers loosened

                                            round the protestors' necks.
Underwater, I prepare myself
                                            for every kind of violence,

aware that resistance is
                                            doggerel, and my mongrel love
opens wide. Born sick,

                                            susceptible to hellish jealousy,
the president turned his hair
                                            into a lucky knot. Ceremonial

power does not stop, or hasten
                                            the sizzle of falling rain, or
bend the wind away from

                                            the banal porticoes. Twitter-
in-Chief, the Cheeto Caligula
                                            is easy prey, praying for

sanctuary, that his lid should
                                            not flip mid-sentence.
Beginnings foreshadow,

                                            prophecies founder, non-
linear arguments web
                                            around us. The language
we speak affects the way

                                            we think. Even if the future
leads, do we follow?
                                            A gap in time, now static,

embroiders the fresh dialectic,
                                            a fact-free epoch, where
the present is a sliver,

                                            transitive, vindictive, in-
capable of yielding to
                                            propriety. Awakened to

this disquieting scene,
                                            on the edge of my property,
thirty-seven perched vultures

                                            in a dead cypress tree. The
First Lady's coif does not
                                            shiver in the shifting wind.

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Copyright © 2020 Keith Flynn All rights reserved
from The Skin of Meaning
Red Hen Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission