Quai des brumes

I just watched Port of Shadows, a 1938 French cinematic masterpiece, on TCM...

  "The high artifice of Port of Shadows, meanwhile, might best be understood if the movie is considered as a kind of song: a boy, a girl, surging love, lurking death."  And the noir and the character of the "sadistic weakling," dilettante gangster -- played by Pierre Brasseur [who wins in the end] -- inspired me to write a poem about George W. Bush...

 

Shrub

Wealth and Inheritance.  In you, it is synonymous with corruption, rot and decay.

Power.  In you, it becomes boorish, stupid and flaccid swagger -- as ineffectual as the liberation of Iraq -- or FEMA after a hurricane.

Politics. Wall Street.  Washington.  W.  They're all the same thing now.  And I hate myself for not having the courage to violence, to fight instead of merely clamoring, like most everyone else, like an abandoned, spotted dog -- for the discarded, trickle-down scraps from your banquet.

Jesus Christ.  If he is your savior, then surely THERE IS NO GOD!

Life.  A world where you are President of the United States twice is a pointless and sadistic moral and intellectual torture.  Mr. President, to me you represent the whole of humanity reaching for the lowest possible rung on the ladder, holding on tight, and being satisfied with it.

Death.  Open the Seventh Seal and pour out the abyss, for I am ready now.  Just let me live long enough to see the end of it.  Bang?  Whimper?   I could care less.  Because there is no denying that the cancer has metastasized.  Shrub, I pray only that, with you, our end has finally begun!