poem
Volume 27, Number 1

Locomotive

Donald Trump is not a US citizen you’ll come across very often. And yet almost anyone in the nation still alert to his or her surroundings has happened upon an electrified TV announcing the words Donald Trump.

Accompanied by his moving image, the two words are generally attached to an incomprehensible story of modern man declaring his dominance over the vastness of otherness that apparently plays on nerves causing build-up of internal pressures that drive man like a steam engine in a heavy locomotive searching for tracks.

The locomotive roars out of the past on unconscious steam that feels like anger searching for a target tough to miss. Step up Donald Trump, who’s a big wig, a real conductor of eminent domain, jaguar tamer who recognizes his dumb otherness without the confusion of facts, Trump who knows how to appear as an executive able to execute plans with a talent for declaring excellence of himself when addressing the unwashed.

For he stands there, gold, a real figure of mythic TV radiance reaching the mind, then underneath it, into primordial pools of growling jaguars and ancestral wars that steam up into angers at otherness.

Step in Donald Trump, holding up a target impossible for anger to miss, when launched from submarines or dropped from top-dog endowment, it’s bombing facts on the ground.

Trust in Donald Trump, who is rich and bold enough he’ll say anything, facts be damned or wholly invented. Invest your steam or else you’re dumb, dumber than others, not to mention left off the train racing through intersections to Roman coliseums.


—James Grabill