Verses Versus Empire: III—The Trump Era

By A LeRoy

"In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See."

So said the poet Roethke, and his words echo in this searing indictment of empire through the lens of poetry…

Through three imperial presidencies,
The poet cries, voice in the wilderness,
Reed swaying in the wind, a bruisèd reed,
His motion stirred to music.

Author, poet, and former Reuters journalist Abdiel LeRoy takes us through the inferno of U.S. politics, with all its absurdities and horrors…

Daring to see and state the obvious,
Decry hypocrisy, prophetically to see
Not just the future but the now,
The awful now and make some sense of it.

The moods range from bawdy wordplay and light-hearted satire to searing irony and melancholic lament. Yet the reader is entertained throughout...

The world a stage on which plays out
Congressional pantomime, a knot
Unable to untie itself.

In this third volume of LeRoy's 20-year Verses Verses Empire series, we witness the rise of Donald Trump with his reign of bombast and blasphemy. We hear the screams of children torn from their parents, the threats of "fire and fury" against other nations, and even denouncements of poetry itself by Trump's racist henchman, Stephen Miller...

The blood
Of innocents cry out to Heaven where
These incensed lines as incense burn,
With hate of Hate and hope of Hope.

Finally, we witness the emergence of Covid, shaking the world's oppressive power structures, just as Moses' plagues tore down empire in his times.

Thus, to quote The San Francisco Review of Books, Abdiel LeRoy emerges as "a brave new presence in the politics of the globe."

That he does so in poetry—along with occasional prose and short stories—makes for unprecedented literary achievement and a legacy collector's item for the discerning library. These works herald a poetic voice for our age, as if the early prophets spoke through Shakespeare and echoed to humanity today.

“If you wanted to extend the critical view of American political history into the present beyond Gore Vidal’s ‘Biography of the United States of America,’ these books would be the ticket… A joy to read and an invitation to keep your eyes open as to what is really going on.”
Rogier F. van Vlissingen

“So well done. A remarkable command of the language and great sensitivity. And doing all this in an entirely new way, wading into (almost) unexplored literary territory.”
Claude Forthomme

“Abdiel LeRoy’s poetry and prose offer intellectual nourishment for critical thinkers and seekers of truth… I highly recommend this book and its companion editions to anyone who seeks to escape from the ‘Matrix’.”
Annemarie M. Osborne

“The perfect portrait of Donald Trump.”
Anna Maria Polidori

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unparagoned
• Release date: Sep 26, 2021

Book preview

Verses Versus Empire

Verses Versus Empire

III—The Trump Era

A. Le Roy

Unparagoned

Copyright 2000-2021  A. LeRoy

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License Notes

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This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, resold, licensed, or publicly performed except as permitted in writing by the author. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text is an infringement of the author's rights. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

Contents

The Verses Versus Empire Series

Foreword

Introduction

2016

The UnDemocrat

Super Doomsday

Aipish

Endrossment

Dis-pair

Triumpant

Clumped

Stand-Off

Agender

Trumplesome

Tumult

Hindsight

Dregs

2017

Size Matters, Mr. Trump !

Karmakaze

The Citizenship Candidate

The End of Time

Imp…

Downfall

The Whole Hog

The Impeachment Principle

Customs

Diverted

Faut Pas !

Con-Scripted

Diss-May !

Fine-toothed Comey

Yemented

Muddied

FourthRight

Mental

Take 20

Arid Zona

Base

Fired

Praising With Faint Condemn

Con-Session

Trumped Up !

The Death of Death

Joeke !

Doused

Dark Hour

Dank

Let's Invade Saudi Arabia !

Aung-uish

End (Miller) Times

Genuflections

Pobre Rico

Macabre !

Silencer

Bankorrupt

Franco-file

Brute Force

Billked

Buena Onda

Douggèd

Cream Pai

Lexiconned

2018

Go, Ahed !

Button up !

Trump's Dump

The Body Politicked

Gun Controlled

Supreme-acists

Reality Check

Rexation

Phony Terrorism Event Triggers World War III

Hapless

Brazen

Ghastly—II

Irany

Accuntable

Summize

Jeffing Hell !

Trump's Little Hostages

First-Class Flight

Fissile

Moscowspiracy

In Yer Facebook !

Tirant

Carackers—II

No Santo !

Reality Check—II

Dark Matter

Hadenough !

Hadenough !—II

Hadenough !—III

Murder Most Saud !

Murder Most Saud !—II

Trump Tribulations

Satanics

Backlass

Whit-less

Grave Error

Resounded

2019

Un Kinder

Diss-Cursive

Diss-Closure

Diss-Pence

'Til Death Do Us Part

Poll Axed

The Wiki Man

C’est La Guerre!

Murder Most Saud !—III

Raw

Pompastic

Sapped !

Parch-ment

Windbags

A.B.U.S.E.

Trump’s Little Captives

Challenge

Trump’s Little Victims

QuadWrangle

Tăoyàn !

Prosaic

A New Earth

Boorish

En Masse

Tarred

Greater!

Greatness

Disfavored

Baklash

Cop Out

Quid Pro Long

Brokered

2020

Ire

The Awakening

Implosion

Sin It

Appeal

Brexsick

Covidious

Covidious—II

Peaceful Reflections on a Pandemic

Peaceful Reflections on a Pandemic—II

A Virus Speaks

A Virus Speaks—II

Preoccupation

Pandemedia

Viperus

Pandemonic

FOiled

Bigle's Lament

Memorial Murder

Herald

On Awakening Empathy

Poetry. Prophecy. Protest. Prose.

Our Champion Pathogen

Karma-la

DNC… PDQ… AOC

Jacob’s Ladder

L-ish

On Virulent Government

Livid

Notoriety

Unquenchable

The End-Times Election

Dead Man Walking

The Blesscurse

Postcard to the Future

Overkill

Unbidden

The Princess President

An Intercessory Intervention

Vial

Audit

2021

A Vacuous Vaccine

2 Little 2 Late

ROut!

Biddable

Sin It—II

Conclusion?

Join the Author’s Readers List

Obama's Dream (Sample)

Wings of Desire

From the Author

Books by A. LeRoy

Epic Poems

Fiction

Poetry Collections

Non-Fiction

Notes

The Verses Versus Empire Series

Verses Versus Empire: I—The Bush Era

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Verses Versus Empire: II—The Obama Era

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Verses Versus Empire: III—The Trump Era

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The Verses Versus Empire Collection: Volumes I, II, and III (2001-2021)

Foreword

John VanDyke Wilmerding

Great literature, especially poetry, can tell us who we are. The poet holds a mirror up to nature, reflecting back to us our deeper selves.

Let me commend to you an exemplar and gifted practitioner in this art. To read his verses is a richly rewarding encounter, even helping us to smile and laugh through the most painful developments in our recent history.

I first ran into Abdiel in the late 1990s when I served as Charter Secretary of the United Nations Working Party on Restorative Justice. I was struck and inspired by his encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, but then came to value his deeper vision, both for myself and for my own audiences and correspondents. Over the years, he has honed his faculties as an artist to such a degree that I have taken to calling him ‘Bard’, conferring on him the title of Poet Laureate of the John Woolman College of Active Peace, an organization I helped found in 2004.

Abdiel’s Verses Versus Empire books are a treasured resource for historians and humanitarians alike, cutting through the veil of culturally conditioned perceptions, testifying to the follies and foibles of the human condition in general, and the political class in particular, and illuminating the ways of peace.

And so I present you with a poet for this tumultuous century, one who thinks and writes in the spirit of Shakespeare and the early prophets, one who has helped deepen our knowledge of ourselves in transformational ways, and whose creative spirit I have come to love.

John VanDyke Wilmerding

UN Working Party on Restorative Justice (1996-1997)

Founder, John Woolman College of Active Peace

Brattleboro, Vermont, USA

Introduction

The systemic corruption at the heart of U.S. politics demands we deliver our denouncements across party lines, and readers will observe I have done so throughout the 20‑plus years of my Verses Versus Empire series. Whatever the superficial differences between establishment Democrats and Republicans, they are allied in the imperial agenda of war, injustice, and planetary rape.

Even so, I was relieved in 2021 to see the departure of a White-House occupant who had threatened other countries with fire and fury, ¹ wrecked international treaties that sought to avert global annihilation, and tried to feed his starving soul with government as his spoon. (For more on Trump's psychological make-up, go to my poem Mental of July 2017.)

Even after Trump's removal from office, the Republican Party he heads remains hell-bent on overruling electorates at the state level while its U.S.-Senate minority exploits the 'Filibuster' (which I don't profess to understand) to obstruct commonsense measures that might benefit the general population. Noam Chomsky had it right in 2018 when he described the U.S. Republican Party as a major threat to human survival and the most dangerous organization in human history. ²

I have written the drama of Trump's reign mostly in verse, for that is what Love compels me to do. And if you would argue that Poetry makes nothing happen, echoing a line of Auden, I counter: Tell me then, what has prose achieved? However well informed, well reasoned, or well expressed, its rivers of ink have splashed harmlessly against the beast of Empire. Prose may make its fine arguments to the mind, but the mind is not ready to receive them unless poetry has first lifted the veil and inclined the heart to fall in love with truth.

I also say, Auden was being ironic. In our great Creation story, God said, Let there be Light! That, too, is a line of iambic poetry. And if poetry can create worlds and universes, then it can certainly change this world!

Poetry can also serve as a rallying call, as demonstrated in August 2017 when CNN's Jim Acosta quoted from The New Colossus, the sonnet at the base of the Statue of Liberty, to challenge the Trump administration's decrees on immigration. I look more closely at the role of Lazarus’ work in my own poems, Base (August 2017) and Prosaic (Aug. 13, 2019).

Consider too poetry's sweet power to convey unpleasant truths, as encapsulated by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, who likens it to honey brushed on the rim of a cup that convinces a sick child to take his medicine. ³

Having said that, prose does most of the work in 2020 with the advent of Covid, as I set out its abolitionist credentials against structures of enslavement and exploitation that have been exploiting planet, peoples, and species.

This third volume in the Verses Versus Empire series begins with the presidential campaigns of 2016 and proceeds with the Trump presidency. (Volume I covered the George W. Bush era, and Volume II the Obama era.)

Beyond wishing to uplift and entertain with these books, I also offer them as historical record, including factual background and my sources for key assertions in copious footnotes. Nevertheless, I don't claim to have covered everything, and I encourage readers to conduct their own investigations into the poems' contexts.

For that, I recommend the online archives of Democracy Now!, an independently funded news broadcast based in New York City. Their website provides daily transcripts of headlines and interviews, along with a powerful search mechanism. It is from Democracy Now! that I gleaned most of the topics for this series, along with underlying data, analysis, and the witty observations of its articulate and well-informed guests.

I hope my verses will create new connections between people, based on the celebration of poetry and art common to humanity. This is genuine brotherhood, as opposed to meaningless identification with a particular country, based on the geographical accident of having been born there!

My own geographical accident was to be born in the U.S. to British parents, conferring on me dual nationality. I trust this background, along with years of living and working in both countries, will excuse the dual spellings used herein. But perhaps my nativity in the English language as a whole, inheriting both the tradition of Shakespeare and the language of present-day empire, was no accident!

Now is the time to attest that the pen really is mightier than the sword, and the poet's pen more than any other. In this era of empty words—and empty words are evil, as Homer observes ⁴—we need poetry more than ever to reach the heart, transform the mind, and change the world!

Abdiel LeRoy

2016

The UnDemocrat

on the Democratic Party's presidential primaries, 2016

Sixty to 38 percent the scale

Of Sanders' victory in the primary,

Yet by the machinations that entail

In New Hampshire's party machinery,

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The delegates are given evenly,

Whatever that means. Who can understand

The gerrymandered means insidiously

Unfoldsing in this process underhand,

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How Clinton's free, undemocratic ride

May candidate her for the nomination

Where rigged voting machines are poised to hide

The true intent of voter inclination?

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You'd think, in calling themselves Democrats,

They'd champion Bernie Sanders but they didn't.

Instead, they line up lobbyists in PACs ¹

Because the Democratic Party … isn't!

February 2016

Super Doomsday

sonnet on latest round of U.S. primaries, 2016

Two Democrats and four Republicans

Remain in this ridiculous contest.

Distorted, disenfranchised, complex, rigged,

The primaries fail all democratic test.

Seconds for Sanders, hours for Donald Trump,

The corporate media blast Trump's trumpet loud

While, monstrous mistress of the platitude,

Clinton grandstands, though Sanders is unbowed.

The peanut galleries of boos and cheers,

Faces of colour staged in ranks behind,

White sheep and black sheep do the parties' bidding.

Breaking down barriers? Blind leading the blind!

'Tis all charade, no wonder voters baulk,

But only Bernie Sanders walks his talk!

Mar. 17, 2016

Aipish

on U.S. presidential candidates at 'town hall meeting' of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Clinton and Trump address the AIPAC floor

To demonstrate which one can grovel more

To Israel's military government

And serve as the oppressor's instrument.

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The tired old cliché Clinton's keen to prate:

Boycotts, divestments, sanctions of the state

Are anti-Semitism and conflates

The Jewish people with the state's dictates,

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Boasts of the weapons systems she'll supply,

Including David's Sling, parrots the lie

That Israel seeks security with this gear.

It's not David's sling but Goliath's spear!

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The ritual obeisance Trump touts

With her and U.N. resolutions flouts.

Both champion Nazi-style occupation,

The genocide, ghettoization,

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And only Bernie Sanders among all

The Primary candidates has got the balls

To call out the illegal occupation

Of Palestinian lands, expropriation.

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Who made America and her politicians

Puppets of Israel and its impositions?

Abominations causing desolations, ¹

They are an Axis of imperial nations!

Mar. 21, 2016

Endrossment

on Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton to be his successor

In praising Hillary, Obama mines

Rhetorical device, Oration's art.

So qualified, he says of her. "She's got

The courage, the compassion, and the heart." ¹

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Americans now face a two-backed beast,

Presumptuous presumptive nominees,

A serial fraud or serial warmonger,

Our democratic deficit's disease.

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And yet again, the lesser of two evils

Is offered voters in this evil crock.

What kind of choice is it if we must choose

Between a hard place and a little rock! ²

June 9, 2016

Dis-pair

on the simultaneous advancements of Hillary Clinton and Theresa May, July 13, 2016

Hillary Clinton and Theresa May

Are both ascendant on this dreadful day,

The former in that Sanders has conceded;

The latter David Cameron succeeded.

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Sadistic sisters, frackers, corporate shills,

A transatlantic partnership of ills. ¹

Ms. Clinton cheered on the Honduran coup, ²

Warmongering oppressor through and through,

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This while she served as Secretary of State

And sought to countenance the accompli fate.

The blood of Berta Cáceres cries out.

U.S.-trained special forces took her out! ³

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Hillary's twin—sordid sorority—

Commercial interests her priority,

And enemy to human rights, is May,

Her record to imprison and betray

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Women asylum-seekers at her gate, ⁴

A xenophobic peddler of hate,

And hostile too, to Mother Earth, denying

The changing climate, our own species dying. ⁵

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So do not think we're seeing a new dawn.

Today, a pair of Thatchers is reborn!

How can they stand for Feminism when

Both imitate the worst aspects of men?

July 13, 2016

Triumpant

sonnet on Republican National Convention, July 2016

Installed by crime and violence, Trump claims

He'll put a stop to crime and violence.

The remedy? More crime and violence,

Torture, assassination, walls, and chains.

Ruling by shouting-vote his rabble hooted,

The RNC, subverting its own rules, ¹

Suppressing delegates, promoting fools,

Manipulating mikes, dissension muted.

Trump's bimbo wife, meanwhile, saw fit to steal

And plagiarize Michelle, ² perpetuating

The age-old pattern of appropriating

Another's property, slavery's appeal.

Were ever voters in this humour won?

He has them now, but will not keep them long! ³

July 22, 2016

Clumped

Betwixt Hard Place and Little Rock, ¹

Devil and deep blue sea,

The American people are called to vote

For Trump or Hillary,

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For a hatemonger or a warmonger,

Misogynist or corporate priestess,

A torturer or a sponsor of coups,

Both hands a bloody mess!

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To waterboard Moslems or flay the Earth,

Pick sides in this sibling rivalry,

Choose walls in Texas or Palestine,

Corruption or the TTIP, ²

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A police state or a surveillance state,

Gun-toting or missile-toting,

Destroying the Bill of Rights or whistleblowers,

Rigging contracts or rigging voting.

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The King of Debt ³ or Queen of Death,

The clumsy butcher or the sadistic nurse, ⁴

Inciting-words or merely empty words,

For voters to determine who's least worst.

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One harvests fear in blocking immigration

And Mexicans as rapists brands.

The other, meanwhile, backing deportation,

For Wall Street and bank bailouts stands,

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She-monster in the making

Assaulting civil liberties,

Promoter of assassination,

Israel's oppression, and austerity.

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The Declaration of Independence

Calls us to transcend this fight,

To abolish this form of government.

That is our God-given right! ⁵

July 30, 2016

Stand-Off

on tactics used by Dakota Access Pipeline Company against Water Protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota

It takes a stand at Standing Rock to show

How far rapacious corporations go

To guarantee that fossil fuels will flow.

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On native protectors, their henchmen set

Their dogs, with human blood the muzzles wet,

The letting underwrit by bankers' debt.

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Through sacred sites belonging to the Sioux,

Scarring the land, polluting water too,

They forge their nonconsensual way anew.

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Pitting oppression