Reconstruction
Lincoln never imagined
today’s white victim zeitgeist,
pouting persecuted supremacists,
their clenched jaws and fists.
Civil war rages in limbic memory.
Encoded somewhere,
the panic attacks and mirages.
Nobody is qualified because everybody is responsible.
So many whites have graduated from the struggle,
showcasing their diploma from the mill.
Lincoln never imagined
modern virtual vitriol,
merciless memes lashing out at specters,
infusing, inciting depravity among the sleep deprived.
These words are battleships aimed at the reviled.
The unshielded summon civility.
They beckon familiar principles.
But rabid cougars wait in hiding, eager to pounce.
All the feeble markets for platitudes have failed,
as subliminal cavities endure each generation.
Mental lynch mobs, rebel flags, supremacy’s utopia.
Lincoln never imagined
a 21st century cartoon president,
a white nationalist clicking social network epithets,
a whining overgrown tormenter
with a cult of Stalinist believers.
Where are the intelligible?
How is all this animated fury converted?
What is the lesson plan?
Who will bury the code?
How long this agonizing journey into normality?
Lincoln never imagined.
Published Tuck Magazine 04/ 2019
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