Oh Say Can You See

welcome to four years,
sparkling tonic water, shiny wooden table, black leather chairs,
farsighted glasses, balding heads,
circumventing the thick air, like a cloak suffocating everything underneath it,
talk of mistresses and the cabinet appointments,
anything but what’s biting through the atmosphere,
anything but the soot and exhaust coating lungs,
anything but the piling waste.

pledge allegiance to mass hysteria, herd mentality,
let’s keep bathing in the conversation,
prune our minds in the same words, in the rotting fluid.

or we could move forward.