Arlene Weiner: Just Sayings

You can’t get anything clean 

Without getting something dirty

But you can get everything dirty

Without getting anything clean

Ought to be a country song

I’m thinking as I sponge out the bathtub

.

Wish fulfillment is why cleaning products

Are called Magic and have a genie emblem

And I’m thinking of the Green New Deal

As I water the amaryllis

Which has finally flowered

On the last day of February 

After years of no bloom 

.

You can’t make an omelet 

Without breaking eggs

But you can break a lot of eggs

And not have an omelet

I’ve been there, at meetings 

Where somebody sang

We’ll dance on your grave motherfucker

.

And I enrolled in the Peace and Freedom party

But wound up voting for Dick Gregory

An unremembered saint 

Instead of a convicted rapist 

Or the Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate 

And Nixon got four more years

.

Water under the bridge between generations

I’m for both the Green and the New Deal

The old New Deal that brought electricity

To the South, the CCC, and the WPA

But left Black people out of the benefits 

And the Green Deal that we need 

If we aren’t going to hell in an icecap melt

.

You can’t fool all of the people 

All of the time but you can fool 

All of the people some of the time

And some of the people all of the time

And if they live in Montana and Wyoming

That seems to be enough.

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(c) 2019 Arlene Weiner