This was not an easy poem to write. I tried to put myself in the head of the leader of the free world to be able to write this history. It's not any place to hang out, to put it mildly.

::::::::

I did it by being a jerk,
By not caring.
By telling the truth,
The real truth, which is

That everything is a lie.
Try it. It works.
Truth? Lie?
What's the difference?

Life is nothing but a foggy mirror.
I just plowed ahead like china in a bull-shop.
There was nothing sheepish about it.
But it worked for me. Know what I'm saying?

Everything was big
And ugly and beautiful.
When I was wrong
I ran the herd.

I ran off cliffs,
Crashed into mountains.
Everyone was out to prove me wrong,
But they couldn't catch up.

I threw them off,
They self-destructed. It was ugly.
At the height of my powers,
I could do no wrong.

I was buried up to my knees in debt,
And they laughed.
Now I'm laughing.
Pathetic. Pathetic.

I buried my democratic
Bones in the sand.
I closed my borders.
I squinted. It worked for me.

I could only see the raw shapes of reality.
I hired monkeys to brief me.
I raged and everyone crossed themselves.
Was I wrong to build towers

With my name on them?
With lettering in proportion to my excesses?
My improprieties were both vast and nebulous.
Sometimes I thought I was god.

I fired the architect,
I fired the doorman.
I fired the cook and the fireman.
I began to see

My enemies swarming
I felt them watching me
When I turned my back.
I would spin around and say, Gotcha!

And they're like What's his problem?
I made friends with tyrants and thieves
For relief from judgment.
I made my story fit my perfect thinking.

I hired people to charm me,
And laugh when I laughed.
I made so much money, you wouldn't believe. . .
I hired lawyers

To shroud my methods
Behind their mumbo jumbo.
I made war on germs,
Sterilizing one terrible disease after another.

I wasn't afraid of dying,
I was afraid of being weak
The weak are losers.
Who knows what I would say if I lost it!

One day I began to crack
Like my father and his father before.
The first cracks were hard to see.
I could only see them with a magnifying glass.

I grew increasingly fragile
I avoided being jolted or bumped.
I covered my cracks like a pro.
Powders, lotions, you name it.

I began to look like a clown.
That was a tough phase,
I clowned, so it would look intentional.
What could I do?

I took a big chance and joined the circus.
There were clowns everywhere!
It was the wrong circus for me
But I didn't care.

It felt wrong to care.
It was the Big Top!
It was nothing but a show.
Biggest show on Earth.

It was a good move for me.
Everything under one big tent.
Acrobats, trained animals
Illusionists, freaks of nature

Dwarves and giants
I felt at home.
It was all wrong.
Wrong as an upside-down plate,

China in a bull-shop.
But you know what?
Don't I look great
In a foggy mirror?

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.