By: David Sapp

Liebchen

Liebchen
You needn’t worry
As we’re civilized
This isn’t 1935
Never mind
The thump of
Jackboots outside
Your window
They’ll pass in time
Return to your
Romance novel
Return to your home
And garden show
Perfect granite
And stainless steel
(Flip that house
Few can afford)
Never mind
That brutal icy round up
(You’re much too pale)
The stifling of speech
The deed to your womb
Remember you voted
Obviously disgruntled
Over the price of eggs
This is Ohio after all
This isn’t 1935

A Comfortable Indifference

Her grandfather
Held a weighty memory
ACHTUNG!
A reluctant young man
Forced to join
The Hitler Youth
So long ago
Not so long ago
What horrors
Did he witness?
His loss of innocence
Somehow (how?)
His moral core
His empathy survived
Just before he died
Upon our first election
Our sanction of hate
He recognized
A too familiar rhetoric
And said something like
“It’s happening again”
A comfortable indifference
He died before the second
Brutal strut and tantrum
Upon the stage we
Willing built for thugs
Thugs all of us now
Unspeakably complicit
This time this time
Who will suffer?

And Here It Is

And here it is
On my way home
Here on Main Street
Here on my street
Here’s the evidence
Makes perfect sense
Here in my inconsequential
White too white town
A cruiser arrogantly
Angled lights flashing
Here is a black kid
Cowering skinny kid
Ten or eleven or twelve
Wary eyes lowered
Shoulders slumped
Judiciously petrified
And here is the deputy
His stripes his badge
A big man a fat man
Gut hung over cuffs
Here he is looming
Over the black kid
Big ol’ sausage fingers
Fingering his gun
And here comes
Another big man motor
Revving hot and heavy
Seems to take two
Uniforms to terrify
This black kid

A Cruel Blasphemy

I do not understand
Fail to comprehend
Why my neighbor
Fires off his guns
Every damn time
One booms like
A small cannon
The other a rapid insult
Fires off his guns
More so – more bullets
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat
After school shootings
Sandy Hook Parkland Uvalde
His paucity of empathy
His incapacity to visualize
The gruesome aftermath
The little bloody bodies
(His fête an affirmation
Of archaic entitlement?)
While witnessing horror
On the evening news
My wife and I wince
Rattled – unconsolable
With his ambiance
A cruel blasphemy

I Want

I want
Dammit I want
Gotta have my cruise
Gotta stuff myself
And gamble and get
Drunk as I want
Floating drifting
On so much steel and oil
And obscene power
All To entertain me

Gotta have
My sailboat my RV
My ski trip my jet skies
Gotta have my mini
Mansion with the perfect
Backsplash tile
Granite countertop
Newest matching appliances
Precisely like all the
Pretty people on TV

(I demand I insist
Callously persistent
A nation of tantrums)

Gotta have my cardboard
Box after box after box
My daily delivered fix
(I’m so friggin’ high!)
For me all for me
Gotta have my gas sucking
Big ass pick-up truck
Hauling all
My insignificance

Gotta have my semi-auto
Gotta have my bullets
Gotta make my itchy
Trigger finger exceedingly
Happy happy happy
My tank my bombs my nukes
I just gotta gotta have it
I want

Sincerely Yours

Dearest dumbass
That would be
You me – all of us
What now?
Exquisitely distracted
While spinning
Your Wheel of Fortune
Your book club
Your brunch
Your cruise
Your abundant consumption
Canada is burning
Did you get a whiff
Of catastrophe
This far south
Acrid in your mouth?
And it’s raining
Every day on the news
Another deluge
Let’s all hitch a ride
Two by two with Noah
(I am thinking there’s
No seat for us in the Ark)
But then whatever
Could you do when
Occasionally terrified for
Your children’s children?
Sincerely yours

###

David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and art. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Asia. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks Solitary Nature, Cardboard Pleasure and Two Buddha; a novel, Flying Over Erie; a book of poems and drawings, Drawing Nirvana; and two books of poetry and prose, Acquaintances and a memoir titled The Origin of Affection, winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award.