We live for the Super Bowl
after limiting the outcome
to two teams.
Three brothers all played
on our high school team,
wounded warriors, it often seemed.
Cold presses on bruises
and after-game body soaks
became a game-night theme.
How did you get that bruise,
I often asked with due concern.
Sighing, they asked do you never learn?
No one likes to be on the bottom.
I was tackled when I caught the ball.
Then everyone piled on.
There are rules it seems in every game.
And who carries the ball
has a special name.
We cheer the ball carrier who gained the right
to run down the field, ball in hand;
headed for the goal-post to our delight.
Opposing teams and its followers never cheer.
They moan and groan and shout in anger,
sensing competition they cannot abide.
Watchers of the game have more swagger,
are more eager to throw weighted hammers
of hateful words and punches in the air.
Losers are the worst and soundly curse players.
They cannot play the game themselves.
and berate their own team’s players worst of all.
No one likes to be on the bottom of the pile.
It takes more effort to climb to the top.
Clawing, and shoving against pinching all the while.
The guy on the bottom has no chance
without a referee, or two, or three.
All rights lost when thrown to his knees.
More men pile on top to hold him in place
where they believe he belongs,
until he is able to fight his way free.
We watch and ask,
our hearts in our throats,
where are the referees?
Not on our city streets.
Nor in Congress, it seems.
America has become a nightmare,
killing the American Dream.
annarino writes 
FALLING FROM A MORE PERFECT UNION
Alito’s words stilled my own.
A falling body has no time
to waste on words when breath
is so precious and undermined
by space displaced by diving
thoughts toward a very dark place.
It is not just Roe which falls with me;
but, likely Obergefell, Griswold
and Loving, too. So old,
I recall them all. The sacred tome
which gives the rights owed humanity
is our constitution which gives privacy a home
of safety, freedom and security.
Alito steals them all from me.
The greater fear is that he would say
mob rule would bind our hands again
with state’s rights to up-end a nation’s democracy.
The word privacy does not exist, so he says.
Nor does the word slavery, nor contraception,
nor sexuality, nor women’s and persons of color’s
right to vote and have a say in lives they own;
because they don’t in the words originally
written for white land-owning gentlemen alone.
But that is the point, one no longer hidden.
White male supremacy, and protecting the wealthy
is Republicans’ true north. Which is why
even women support letting democracy die.
Why even kind men still vote for extremist
candidates they know can save their wealth
by telling the most outrageous lies.
Stolen election is not the first lie.
The first was that women and Africans are less
than any white man of wealth could allow
to be free, for fear their fields of wealth
once shared, would lie fallow.
I thought I could no longer write poetry
while my love for country makes me cry
knowing my beloved Law is often denied.
The law is sacrosanct, you see.
Alito’s words mean the courts are no longer free.
And that will be the death of the rights
of you and me, and perhaps the world
whom my country once led toward democracy.
The world is falling along with me.
I am not alone if you join me and vote
for those who would protect us as we fall,
and right the wrong words which stand so tall
we can no longer recognize truth at all.
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Filed under COMMENTARY, POETRY, POLITICS
Tagged as constitutional rights, end of democracy, extremism, Griswold, Justice Alito, Loving, miscegenation, Obergefell, ROE V. WADE, rule of law, slavery, VOTE, voter suppression, white supremacist, women