Mike Schneider: In the Post-Truth World
the game of truth or consequences
has no consequence. What does it matter
if insurance agents quote Thoreau? The mass of men
still lead lives of quiet desperation. Guns
are not on sale at the mall. My best friend still
has pancreatic cancer. My other best friend smokes
a stinky cigar he’d like to poke into the president’s
face. Meet the world’s 20 insurance billionaires
is something no one wants to do. Only I am
a narcissist in the post-truth world. Only I understand
tyrants as a kind of fruit that grows on trees, many
of them planted by intelligence. There is no intelligence
in the post-truth world. A small tyrant lives inside
me. I feed him poetry. In the post-truth world, no one
has been shot dead at the movies. Dimpled small white
spheroids do not soar over meadows toward holes marked
by flagpoles. His throat shredded by carcinoma, my father
hoped for one more summer of golf. I have no cause
for outrage in the post-truth world. Presidents
don’t commit sexual assault. All the flags are not
in love with their own flapping. Boots with spurs
do not go jingle-jangle. The first lady will be
always a fierce warrior-goddess heart-mother
of love. To study physics is to worship God
is the core belief of every religion. No one knows
when the train will arrive. Accommodation is not
the destination. It goes without saying that your money
is no good here. In the post-truth world, poems often don’t
draw you into a sorrowful deep well of feeling. You
don’t sigh & say Ahhh. No one is not an island
paradise. No one has elected as president
of their country a man with fake tan that makes him orange
with white circles around his eyes like a raccoon, a hungry
rodent gazing at you from dumpster-alley shadows.
Copyright 2017 Mike Schneider
Mike Schneider won the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize (selected by Richard Foerster) from Texas Review Press, which in 2017 will publish his chapbook How Many Faces Do You Have?
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Trump’s tan through the ages: 2002, 2004, 2005, 2014 (image from Zuma Press)
Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year: “post-truth” . . .
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Wow, good thought. by the way, I just blogged about post-truth, may like to check it out. http://wp.me/p8p4rd-ii
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Reblogged this on Myriad Ways and commented:
So nicely put. We all have our inner toddler fascist rodent living in our skin, but if we feed him/her with poetry and love s/he will grow bored and calm the ceaseless rage of neediness. We need to make connections internally to understand the mayhem inherent in our enemies’ soul. We need to understand the extent of the utter eclipse of empathy by fear and the black hole of need that will suck the life of our existence.
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Every line of this poem is so carefully crafted that essays could be written about them. The poet leaps from thing to thing and yet the entire poem coheres into a satirical masterpiece. I’m so grateful that in the post post-truth world we have a poet like Mike Schneider to cast such a ruthless light on our national darkness.
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https://voxpopulisphere.com/2017/01/31/hannah-arendt-on-the-use-of-lies-as-a-political-strategy/
“All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” — Dylan, Things Have Changed
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I’m not judging him by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.
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So the Dump wasn’t always orange?
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