It’s true, I’m going to be publishing a few of The Samizdat poems out of order. If you want to always get them in order along with occasional awesome broadsides of the poems designed by Jaime Questell, you can pledge the Patreon here for $1 a poem to support both political poetry and various charities.

As for this poem, it seems to grow more true as time goes on, as the White House becomes the Muddy Gray House, no longer emblematic of a shining city but instead a back room filled with cigar smoke. If the head of a government is insane, how can the body be anything but?

Even the Grass

And soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity and treason.

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Even the grass is tearing itself up by the roots.

Even priests drag down prayers from the heavens.

Even our organs are organizing against us. If I remove

my lungs, I remove the need for clean air. This is the logic

I was born for. Some other people were born

but this is not their poem. They have no poems

or need for poems, the insurers tell me. Even the grass

needs taking care of. Even a dull mower gets the job done.

What are we left with? A denuded ground, a desert of dirt

a stiff rain washes into the river. Even the sun

is blind. Steeped in its gloried light, even the grass

stretches up like arms, grasping for as much

as the muscles and tendons will let them take.