The Trump Epigram

(With apologies to Osip Mandelstam)

The rug is pulled away from beneath our feet.
Words are whispers eavesdropped at a safe distance.
We pick them up like pine cones for the samovar,
and once we have gathered enough to cook up a conversation
it turns out to be about the great builder of skyscrapers and hotels.

He waves his tiny hands like scales in a hurricane
weighing up his big ideas with his repertoire of gestures,
while his corny harvest of hair competes with Boris'
to see whose is the most ungovernable. And his shoes are shiny.
Really, he has the shiniest shoes. Everyone says so.

He surrounds himself with a squalid cabinet of poultry,
a menagerie of half-men. One squawks, another mewls,
he alone tweets. Their supplications are paperweights,
their obsequies briefings. The bright meteor show of their arrival
merely heralds the asteroid impact of his own mighty deliberations.

His executive orders will be like mighty hammer blows
and the anvils on which he will make them are your groin,
your forehead, your temple, and your eye, and once you are blind,
he will turn to leave this oval forge, this lectern, this studio,
all the microphones where he performs his daily heroism,
and embrace old acquaintances waiting in the wings.