Only a fool would seek his likeness in history.
Seek not this clown in Machiavelli’s folios—this jester
who does not laugh, this prima donna who does not cry.
This celebrity glutton who sanctified his wickedness
in the gold glow of TV and the internet.
Soft orange hair like a juvenile wild boar;
a smile dark as Manhattan sewers at midnight;
roulette table red blotting his cheeks;
and he sees in the mirror a bronze Achilles,
dethroned only by cruel fraud.
Yet this aspirant führer stinks of history:
he hammers democracy’s feminine frailty
and sells macho visions of empire
and dime bags of victimhood on air.
He tests the nation’s social divisions
like he’s forking a medium-rare steak,
testing for tenderness, watching
the blood streak across the plate.
When pestilence comes, he bets
he can ride the nation’s hearses to godhood.
The clown who TV made president
speaks shibboleths of tyranny when
he orders bloodshed in the metropolis.