Batagai Slump

"Sitting at my table in my only chair"

 

Doubtful anyone’s practiced

The slogan, “All Lives Matter.”

All? Ants’ lives? Murderers’ lives?

Naegleria fowleri?

Nonetheless, a young woman

With a bumper-stickered car

In a Utah parking lot

In the summer of strange plague

Says so aloud. She’s talking

To a stooped, white-haired woman

In the desert morning’s sun

About all that’s on her mind—

“Oh, Fauci. He’s bad. He’s bad.

He lies. He lies through his teeth.”

Interesting to overhear

In passing. In a few years,

That name will be forgotten,

More or less, a reference,

Then the president he serves

And whom her stickers adore—

Her hero, it seems, the one

With the countable records

For stating maybe the most

Lies ever, most openly,

Often, most frequently caught.

Perhaps all lies don’t matter.

It seems a liar’s not one

Who tells lies but one who says

Things that we really don’t like.

I’ve never met a human

I suspected never lied.

It would be so alien.

The best lies we tell ourselves,

Such as that we’re not liars,

That we know who liars are.

This too will be forgotten

And is forgotten daily.

Someday, just historians,

And not all of them, at that,

Will study this twisted plague,

One year on a calendar

Until calendars are gone,

One year that a president

Sent troops to club protestors,

One year slogans did battle,

One year corruption triumphed,

One year so like and unlike

All others full of liars,

One year so many hotheads

And factories and engines

Had warmed our planet so much

A vast slump had opened up,

Ray-shaped gap in permafrost

Deep enough to abseil down

A few hundred thousand years

To when there were no liars,

In that neighborhood at least,

No parking lots, no stickers,

No gas-happy officers,

No presidents, supporters,

Or gods in the night. Just lives.

No lives matter to the night.