workin' on a thing for a thing in poetry

This is a hard time to do comedy
because there’s nothing funny about Donald Trump being president.
There isn’t.
Nothing.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Donald Trump himself is funny.
He’s a rotten pumpkin full of bees you leave out on the back stoop in mid November for the dog to fuck.
He’s a bloviating faux-leather wallet that rolled around in spray tan and taped cotton candy to its head.
He’s a stammering tiny handed shitlord racist sexist homophobic born-rich Little Lord Fauntelroy sex criminal.
He’s a weeping bedsore on the comatose body of the American dream dripping fetid ooze on the bed of the collective subconscious.
He would be a sex-offender in a halfway house 1000 yards from any school or if his father wasn’t a millionaire fuckin’ Klansman, right?
But because his father was a millionaire Klansman arrested at a Klan rally opposing Irish Catholics being allowed to be cops,
he got to be rich and famous with the attention span and IQ of a heavily concussed squirrel hopped on a gallon of Red Bull.
Donald Trump might be the worst human being in America who has never been jailed for serial murder.
Conceptually, Donald Trump is amazingly funny.
He is everything wrong about America in an ill-fitting suit and a shitty wig.

But there’s nothing funny about Trump actually being our president.
He’s promised to take tens of millions of people’s health care away.
He’s promised to take away women’s rights to their own bodies
gay folks their marriages
trans folks their very identities, y’know?
Separate three million economic refugees from their families via mass deportations
and grind the economy of the American Southwest to a screeching halt
just because pretending Mexicans aren’t human beings
is the only way he can get hard anymore.
The only way Donald Trump can get a…
raging two, maybe two-and-a-half inch erection anymore
is pretending that Mexicans aren’t people.

You would have to be the sickest kind of nihilist whoremongering diarrhea stream of a human being
to find any of that funny.
You’d…
To find that funny, you’d basically have to be…
(Bill Hicks pause)
Donald fuckin’ Trump.

This is a hard time to do comedy.

Any morning, this shaved ape Nazi racist private-school washout
could order all Muslims to wear yellow crescents on their shirts
start warming up a fleet of box car trains
and fuckin’ dead-end Bernie Bros would still be telling us
that’s not the real issue
the real issues are the way the DNC nominating process is run
and they’ll feel so ideologically pure and hip
while Trump sends our friends and neighbors
to motherfucking gas chambers and…
there’s nothing funny about that.

You can make fun of the kind of mindset you’d have to have
to vote for Donald Trump.
What kind of logic a person could have to vote for
a cross between Mr. Burns from the Simpsons and Benito Mussolini
we could go that route.

“I went on Twitter and I really liked his little green frog mascot,”
they might say
“I make all my life choices based on mascot” they might say
“that’s how I pick my car insurance, that’s how I pick my president”
“I don’t care that he gleefully admits to sexual assault”
“was in the pocket of Vladimir goddamned Putin” “surrounds himself with people who made their living off anti-semitism”
“judges people by the colour of their skin not the content of their character”
“I just love that little Pepe The Frog on Twitter”
“he’s so adorable”
“I saw that little frog with the bloodshot eyes and I thought”
“I’m not voting for that… confident woman”
“I am voting for the candidate who refuses to even accept the idea of sexual consent”
“because of that adorable little frog Pepe!”

That’s funny.
America being full of people who don’t think
a damn thing through to its eventual consequences
that’s funny as hell
in a dark way.

But there’s nothing funny about Donald Trump being president.
Not when he can stack the court
not when he has a rubber stamp congress
not when he’s encouraged racists under rocks all across America
that it’s okay to burn black churches again
that it’s okay to throw glass bottles at gay people’s heads again
that it’s okay to tag every other street corner with schwastikas again
that they think that’s how you
make America great again.

There’s nothing funny
about that.

But I try, anyway
despite all the horror and terror coming
I still get up in the morning and I try
I try to find something funny in
the reigns of the American experiment being handed
to a vulgar silver-spooned loose-stool stain hate criminal douchebag
to do with as he liked
as a disturbed child with a knife
might hack away at his sister’s barbie dolls.
Or
you know
his sister.

I’ve come up with two that MIGHT work.
One’s a traditional set-up punchline joke.
One’s more of a Seinfield observational thing.
Lemme try ‘em out on you.

What do a hammer, a sickle and Donald Trump all have in common?
(pause)
They’re all well-known Russian tools.

And this:

Well,
at least now we know
no one’s ever gonna invent a time machine.

See?
See?
It’s very hard
it’s very hard to be funny about
a president who is literally a neo-fascist
and metaphorically a piece of maggot-flecked shit.

But we go on.
We keep trying to be funny
and we keep on resisting hate
wherever we can
however we can
for as long as we can.

We resist hate.
We resist hate.

And…
I dunno.
I kind of like the time machine line.
In a dark way.
Thank you.