Taking the Curves

by Shaun Grub

(art by Greg Grub)

"Urvy thing I do is quite unhinged 'at's the nature of it, innit?
There's no waitin' around for the whiplash tail to strike back
And why'd ye? Nasty ol' barbell rudder like on a Stegosaurus
Back from a yawning chasm to lick us down the gullet.

I ain't 'ave it, nor do I got to; as for you, step aside for a sec
while we maintain the deck from the storm ahead between us
There's time already swept under and gone lost to the bridges
fallen behind; if I could reach through this gale force I would!"

To be plucked into the under-swept currents of a sudden
and be swept catapulted away by a rip-tide there's no way
of knowin' it could lurk so powerful and in silence nearby; 
these are the marks and hallways of the turbulent passages

whose torrential voltage in a bound cable would be captured
and guided by a network of concurrent developments
sanctioned by the hard earned dreams of the people as they
line up in their dwellings to pay tribute to their sacrament 

taking the curves along the impromptu management
where solid footing lies more deceptive underneath 
in stealth as it awaits until the molten day breaks all around 
to be re-cast one bit at a time into the manifold bridle harness 

as riders of the ultraviolet age we transmute the Hydra 
with multiple scales grown one after the other overlapped 
and shown in the mirrors of each other's eyes sun-struck
blinding us from oblivion if only for a moment's unwinding.

"Avast, the still serenities of the day unfoldin' as it ebbs away
into the purple majesties of night with the wind's own tongues
a-preenin' the mercurial carapace of this, our salient domain 
as the ceremony of ablutions never ends the pabulum of days!" 

                                                    art  by  Greg Grub

Phony Cheat Under the Spotlight on Independence Day

 by roving reporter Shaun Lawton 
              writing for the Oscillating Oculus

   The grave threat to the nation focused most of his scripted speech before a stupefied crowd of several thousand gathered together to defy social isolation Wednesday and get a piece of their penny of time alongside the few minutes left for this freak show ringleader to hunch down and gloat over. While the glib human toad is in the business of tearing down U.S. history's heritage, his particular idiomatic response is to channel this singular reproachful fact about him back at his attackers and make them appear to be guilty of the very crimes he's committed. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book and they fall for it every time.

     Tottering before the sacred grounds of the Lakota in supplication before the stony carved visages of real chief executives before him, the crotchety slouch's shadow leans away from Bethlehem as he whispers in a croaking vocal about his arrogant dream to further deface the sacred mountain with his own likeness and erase more of its vintage primordial pareidolia of real native faces blending into the landscape. Genuflecting to his propped-up false idols while wishing to join them, Don Drumpf clicks his boot heels obliterating any golden opportunity for the president of these United States to make a single coherent statement in support of the great diversity of American people standing by during a national emergency crisis of a pandemic that is spreading at maximum capacity now that this demented fire-starter demon in grotesque human form openly doubles down on the oppression of the indigenous tribes whose sacred land has been violated explicitly by our government's spiteful demolishing of the Sioux's own spiritual justice and society. 

     The little clown prince standing stiffly like a marionette whose strings have been cut now seems possessed as his facial tics twitch and his smile quirks on and off like shorting circuits and his hands fan out in a supplicating gesture—an indication he wants you to see he's got nothing to hide up his sleeve. But you see, as I do, that the reason he does this, is because he's exactly got something quite hidden up his sleeve. He's a human who's snake skin has been shed within and molted to rot on the inside. This dime store ancillary celebrity in a cheap two dollar suit (with a tie soaked in blood that is very much too long—like his time spent in office) whistling his fake song luring the all-too-susceptible with ease and carrying it off just as effortless as you please with closed circuit television and private donations with digital feedback loops circulating through the bloodstream of users online throughout the nation like a viral infection on the attack as more false memes replicate in the speech patterns of generations of young people who are just trying to have a good time beyond Moses and the steeple. This executive officer is a con man with Norman Rockwell delusions; a puffed-up scarecrow, a dry straw-man sowing confusion until one of his own who's fed up will drop a lit match upon, after striking up a light on a cold moonlit night, heaving a long pent up sigh in a wheeze of disappointment that will disappear into the wind over the sea. No one will have heard it and besides, they will have moved on trying to forget about the damage he caused because reparations have already been well underway for some time now.  We, the people of this great nation, are nothing if not resilient. 

     In truth, it is Trump himself who has been demolishing both justice and society from his deleterious appointments in the white house while under the banner of official US social justice.  He's the primary instrument of incessantly stating and tweeting everything he can to maximize division and actively stir up the idea of vengeance in his excitable base's easily stoked views. The only one standing out as being dominant and exclusionary is the two-faced liar-in-chief that got elected president of the United States on a degenerate lark.  He spits the selfsame rhetoric that makes him a sick tumor on the face of our outstanding nation. He needs to be excised as quick and with as much precision as we can manage. Voting him out of office at this point has become a matter of paramount mandatory civic duty. For the sake of American families across all fifty states of this tremendously strong and diverse land, the demonic annihilator of our American dream must be stopped once and for all, if we can. 

     Donald Trump represses the American dream and twists it into a parody of itself before his rapt audience who manage to act as a sieve and let it all get soaked in to their shared public bath-house without realizing the scabrous toxic stink that will surely infect the precious limited air they voted into office seeping into their lungs like a deadly odorless gas displacing the oxygen we need to breathe one molecule at a time. He is the animate focal point of this lethal viral transmission. It's his own paranoid radical ideology that actually steals the dreams of the people he intends to rob blind while he dares to plaster a deceptive grin across his own face like a leering mask he can wear for the cameras.  A more terrifying monster I find difficult to imagine in a realistic context, considering my place in the matter at stake. And the pundits and paid advertisers who sponsor the program reiterate the mantra memorized oh-so-well while they mass-hypnotize the malevolent lurkers and ignorant watchers and innocent victims gathered around and held under this cabal's growing collective spell.  All while striving in every legal capacity to silence the people during the short window he has left before the possible guillotine blade of his first term drops down to bid it's sharp farewell. The bald faced split-tongued deceiver and misleader clicks out his tweets and fabrications in what could only be thought of as masterful verbal manipulations by the very crowd stunned into submission by it. 

      I'll tell you who won't be silenced, you piece of filthy dried-out sausage casing. You terrified zombie in a zoot suit. You illegitimate offspring of a drunken bet gone wrong put on by overgrown frat boys who never got rid of their juvenile rape fantasies and jock straps. It's the staggering heartfelt majority of this nation that's still great and strong despite you being in it, that's who—Mr. Helter Skelter, bad weather inciter, Senor No Me Gusta y un hijue de la gran puta. Mr. Stuttering Blunderbuss—time to take what's left of your luck and get the hell outta Dodge. Mr. Sad Faced Clown Man who ended up getting pulled off stage with a great curved cane. When the lights wink out and the curtains swing shut that'll be the end of you, Scuttlebutt. Vamoose, idle executioner of the poor and displaced. Get the Hell out of here and never dare to show your face in public again because we can't be held responsible for the reactions you engendered.  

     The forty fifth president of the United States who directed police troops to "do what it takes" to clear the pathway for his walk to a church for a deliberate photo-op with a bible he doesn't even believe in; this man who crashed the republican party and not only sold them his snake oil which they willingly bought but I'll bet he intimidated them too with his sinister cabal of connections. And he has the emotionless audacity to stare at the camera without blinking once and accuse the people of the USA of totalitarianism? It appears the man hasn't instructed an aid to look into a dictionary for him in quite some time. It's apparent he can't even read (or at least won't be bothered to) and he's never even considered some of us may actually know what those words mean! 

     During an unprecedented novel coronavirus pandemic and a paradigm shattering revolutionary systemic uprising and openly flagrant rebellion toppling monuments while inciting riots and defacing public property while being framed for it too by all manner of public and covert gang members operating as double agents who some wear it black and some wear it blue but all are nothing more than your dime store domestic terrorists on the loose; make no mistake about it, and while I'm at it, let me shout it from the rooftops.  

     Turning Americans against one another is what this president does best. And you know what he says, he's the greatest at it, don't you even doubt it. Oh yeah this guy's all about it. You can see through his disguise if you look with open eyes and notice this emperor without any clothes on. He's like an evil substitute teacher who stumbled into class one day half drunk and is now teaching his students to hate their own people and to believe their ancestors who helped build the country weren't heroes but villains and monsters.  And for some reason nobody will ever fathom most of the classroom laps it up, hootin' and hollerin'.  Well this A-hole's flat out lies aren't something most Americans are willing to be swallowin'.  And that's the truth reflected from behind the mask. We the greater portion of Americans won't breathe in the hot air and foul gas. We can see beneath our own lamp light, thank you very much. And I don't need any paid TV pundits or made up stories to read about on the web that try to dictate what goes on in my head to lead me on to believe what's not true. My own head is already squarely set on my shoulders, Mr. Trump. So you can take your tired old see through shtick and shove it where the sun don't shine.  Which happens to be in your direct political future. You put our lives at stake and on the line so now we must drive that wooden stake, after sharpening it, back through your heart. It's the only way to stop your kind, that's the difficult part.  Or maybe we should just harpoon you and drag you out from under the cellar to be consumed for all to see screaming out in agony in the wide open daylight in front of everybody. There won't be much of a crowd by then no matter how much space is allowed. But hold up because this reporter isn't done. 

  I've got an idea for the fourth of July. Ban the popular sale of public fireworks completely. Why don't we make them illegal? And if we go out and buy them on the black market, the Firepolice come to your home to spark it with their Firetrucks full of kerosene and...I'm just kidding, all you drooling idiots, they don't burn your home down, because frankly, we're doing a well enough job of that right now on our own.  We don't really have to fulfill our dystopian scenarios, even if they're already well under way. We know what two and two make. We like the rainbow of colors, not just gray.  If each state's cities sanctioned an official fireworks display, think about how much more special it would be when you had to bring out the whole family. Talk about restoring classicism to our most venerable old traditions in a legal and systematic way. But I digress, where was I, what a mess. Can any of you even imagine for a moment what Mount Rushmore would look like today if our own government hadn't defaced it with the awesomely garish hackneyed display which destroyed the mountain's natural possessed beauty and its majestic original state? Nothing can prepare the human mind for the exquisite face of nature. It's a shame that men in charge before us decided to undertake an enterprise of such immense scope and proposition as to veritably guarantee, looking at it in hindsight, that the endeavor was done out of sheer spite dressed in open hatred and hostility not in disguise, as if it were an act of sadistic defiance, kicking the fallen and grinding the native American's profile into the dirt under our military's sanctioned boot-heel. As an American citizen I demand nothing short of a redress of grievances and a concerted effort from the federal government to restore proper ownership of these sacred lands to the Lakota Indian tribes. Furthermore I have prepared a petition to merely consider demolishing this so-called "shrine of democracy" that took seven years to carve out of the mountain in defiance of the Six Grandfathers it was formerly known as. Just a moment of silence considering our disrespect to show the council of elders a micro-fraction of solidarity.  A gesture that we're collectively sorry today that our ancestor's trampled over their rights. Some indication we are willing to pay for our own grandfather's mistakes. 


   This forty-fifth president brings to light the entire grisly and candid phenomenon of our fore-fathers' arrival to this sweeping land's shores.  There's a whole nether history of native American ghosts and vanishing tribes on the winds of time still lingering in the air. If we haven't the capacity to learn from our past errors and today make the changes within us necessary to do the hard work of paying back what we owe in terms of unjust butchery and pillaging of the people who lived here in relative peace before us, then are we just doomed to repeat the same old cycle of pent-up vengeful violence as we stand back and allow the machinery of war to grind on both economically and with its outmoded idealism preserved? That's a perverse abomination of the real spirit behind our nation. How about this if you can just imagine it. The president of the United States arrives to the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota, and in an historic moment filmed before a panorama of international cameras, he officially decrees these lands to be fully surrendered back to the original tribes that owned it, restoring the former glory to the Six Grandfathers in an act of contrition that vows reparations. Pardon me; that would only be possible if we had a real leader with genuine courage and the moral capacity to lead us forward through these dark and turbulent times—and weren't stuck in a rut with Donald J. Trump for president. That's just the dream of an alternate timeline where we progressed onward as the great nation capable of justice we were initially set up to become. Until he accidentally slipped in to this three-ring-circus our broken political system has turned into. 

     If you really want to celebrate our Independence this year so we may collectively live on to realize our great nation's wavering dream, please consider your civic duty to register and officially vote this November, because if enough good people gather together to vote this Crimson Clown out of office just five months from now we may have just reached the malignant tumor and excised it before it metastasizes to render our promising country into the dead and rotting corpse that petty oligarchs with delusions of autocracy such as Trump do not care they are most decidedly pushing us toward.  Get as many of your friends to vote in November for anyone but Trump so we can move ourselves forward. The reason we've always been a great nation is due to the fact we're a melting pot comprised of all the diverse ethnicity to be found on Earth. The extensive variety of sworn-in US citizens from every national culture on the planet combined here to flourish together in peace and prosperity and bound by our constitution is exactly what our heritage stands for. And we should not allow ourselves to fall when we can stand together and elect a better president who can guide us forward through all the coming storms of rough weather ahead.  Bless America, every single one of us.