Two Poems

I.

What is “identity politics”

            In 2017?

Does anyone even know

  What that term means?

I can see how in the old days,

Putting up the Quebec flag

Or saying “Why wasn’t Columbus included?”

Could be kind of a drag

  But these days it seems

Like all it signifies

Is: “issues mainly concerning people who are not –

  Ahem,

white guys.”

Tell me true,

You of the Bernie-arian, Thomas Frankian breed,

How does one categorize –

According to your creed –

  An issue like mass incarceration

Or deportation –

is that

Identity politics? – and if so,

  Is it the immigrants who are

in your view

obtrusively asserting their collective identification?

  I find that hard to believe –

When it is they who are being torn away

  To serve someone's idea of a “nation.”

How about in the prisons -- is it identity politics to mind

That some people for years and decades

Are solitarily confined?

Or is it just those pint size

Trivialities like

Transgender rights

That you kindly think should be tabled

Til we win the labor fight?

  Many might do so gladly – they just don’t exactly wish

To be subjected to TV ads 

That say “egad! They must be criminals –

These women-seeming men!”

You see, some don’t go looking for it –

  The identity politics finds them.

Oh, Bernardarians, can we just please not pretend

That there is any great insight to be gleaned

Or “lessons learned and mastered”

From disastrous 2016

Men such as Trump there always have been

  And always will be

Nor should it in the least surprise us

That they are skilled in the art of deceiving

And gaining cheap wealth and power

Since it is the only thought to which such brutalized beings

Have ever devoted an hour

The fact is that some men

Have got very little in their souls

And are missing several other parts

(For they’ve got still less in their minds

And nothing at all in their hearts)

Such men, like our President,

Can be pitied, for aught

Seeing that they have inside them

Pretty much naught

But after that, one proceeds,

Until one is caught

On the assumption that meanwhile --

They have got to be fought.

II.

I am, after all,

A particular thing

A defined, and circumscribed

Wrathful little being

And much as I might wish to be 

Capable of much else (Science! Music! Thoughtful Metrical Analysis --

  Scanning and commentary!)

The fact is there remains only one thing I seem 

equipped to impart -- 

Or spill onto the page --

Namely, a distilled and particular variety

of moral rage

 (Mine is a head 

    That thinks easily in terms

    Of "atrocities" and denunciations -- always had.

  I'd make a good

    Policer of any orthodoxy)

Now -- as a young child I found

That being me was a shame

But when I turned twenty-seven

Suddenly, it became 

An inestimable prize

And one unfairly gained

Certainly I'd done nothing to earn 

  this immeasurably pained

Yet glorifying state (like a crucifix)

Of being me

  -- (So far as I could see)

And one realizes that life feels,

Past a certain age

Like a series of stifling prisons

From which one has only recently made an escape -- 

And a narrow one at that

  Indeed the exodus is so fresh 

That one fully expects

That at any moment one's former

Math teacher, warden, or camp counselor

Will hastily decide

To say from the stairway balcony: "Hey! We've been looking for you -- 

Get back inside!"