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Let’s Laugh at Leftists
with a nod to Joseph S. Salemi
Step right up and see the freaks,
Who call sane values mere antiques!
Hear them weep and moan and whine
When you won’t ape the party line!
See the clowns: “transgendered” males
Who grow their hair and paint their nails,
Insist their children call them Mommy,
Their cocks are cut like kirigami,
And shove their stubbly, brow-ridged faces
In all the women-only spaces!
Though they are female in their eyes,
The science tells us otherwise!
Step right up and see the freaks!
Go ahead and sneak some peeks!
Hear the leftists’ only prayer:
“Fair is foul and foul is fair!”
See the families, now so small,
It’s like they don’t have kids at all!
And then they send their few to schools
To learn to live by circus rules
So moms can slave at jobs like men
And rarely see their kids again
And later send them off to college
To learn more lies and call it knowledge!
Step right up and see the freaks,
More decadent than pagan Greeks!
See the men look so forlorn
As they get off on pixel porn!
See young women’s modern fashions
Snuff out what’s left of young men’s passions!
Tattoos obscure their pretty places
And metal stabs through pretty faces!
That, plus their masculine demeanors,
Will soften all the young men’s wieners—
For beauty lifts men’s hearts to greatness
And thus provokes the left’s irateness!
Step right up and see the freaks!
Hear their hatred come in shrieks
If you should argue for the rights
Of unborn babies, men, and whites!
See the single mom by choice
Who stole her child’s father’s voice!
Hear them all around affirm:
She only needed him for sperm,
And if her child should want his father,
Then say, “Quit being such a bother!”
For men are brutes who must be tutored
Until their hearts and minds are neutered!
Step right up and see the freaks,
Whose tears could make some good-sized creeks
Simply from their daily dealings,
Because your words have hurt their feelings!
See the man who lives alone,
Whose sole companion is his phone,
Who signals to the faceless names
How good he is at leftist games!
If anyone should dare expose
The leftist emperor’s lack of clothes,
He types his message to the void:
“I’ve read your words, and I’m annoyed!”
Step right up and see the freaks!
Hear their hate for him who speaks
For family, Christian faith, or truth—
They shout that he’ll corrupt the youth!
See Church leaders join right in,
Defrocking good, promoting sin!
Come listen to their leftist preachings
Against the Holy Bible’s teachings!
Hear them claim that Jesus taught
The current form of leftist thought
And preach their anti-gospel, ruthless,
Until the Christian faith is toothless!
Step right up and see the freaks,
Who’ve won the world with new techniques:
Make sin a virtue (oh, how cunning!)
Through some Amish-style shunning!
See the best exhibit yet:
The governmental marionette!
Elect the red or blue this year—
No difference to the puppeteer!
For he’s the one who pulls the strings
Of presidents and popes and kings,
But never say he does exist,
You dumb conspiracy theorist!
You’re laughing? I’ve got news for you:
Freaks run amok like Wuhan’s flu!
People’s souls, through sin, are dying
As all the freaks keep multiplying!
Protect your family from the virus
Lest you all become desirous
Of their prestige, their cash, their cliques,
And soon turn into circus freaks!
.
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Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland. His poetry has also been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, and many others, and his short fiction has been published in several journals as well.
This is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated and brilliant stabs at the leftist mobs that now inhabit our land! Such great rhyming words that provide exacting and vivid images of our now degraded culture. There is so much to absorb and reflect on inhabiting your great poem. Joshua, you have shone a bright light into the dark corners of our world! Bless you for sharing this with us!
Thank you, Roy. I love Joe Salemi’s poems on similar subjects so much, I had to write this.
It looks like you’ve covered everything in an expert poetic way. It’s too bad we can’t share it with those who need it, or, I should say you could, but they wouldn’t read it nor would they recognize themselves if they did.
Thank you, J. D. Sadly, people like that recognize our view of them in this poem, but never stop to think about whether maybe, just maybe, it has at least a grain of truth to it. Or, if they do, they insist that this is somehow yet another proof of how virtuous they are and how depraved we are along with all of humanity who came before us.
Joshua, what can I say? I’m grateful that you have done me the honor of mentioning me in your epigraph to this polemical poem. If I have had some influence on your style and diction choice, I am happy to have been of some help. But the main credit for this slashing poem belongs to you, the author.
There is a toughness and panache in this poem that is very effective, and the vivid comic vignettes that you paint of your targets (done in a fierce tetrameter) are powerful. And using this kind of take-no-prisoners style is really the only way to go now — we are in a real war, and “friendly persuasion” is out the window at this point.
The enjambment works well — there is nothing that interrupts the flow of syntax (often a problem in longer poems that have a lot of enjambment). And some of your lines have a good trochaic start, which always adds force to a poem.
The unfettered sexual vocabulary is also a breath of fresh air. “Cocks cut like kirigami” — ha!
Just one minor nit — in the nineteenth quatrain, the line “Through some Amish-style shunning” is metrically askew. I’d suggest something like this:
“Through cancel-culture’s brainless shunning!”
Thank you Joe! Having read your poems, I have definitely added you to my list of influences, so I’m really glad you enjoyed this one, and that it was poetically pleasing.
The idea came from a quote from The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker: “We cannot act like Paul on Mars Hill pointing out the altar to the unknown god in Acts 17. [Leftism] believes in nothing; it has no Areopagus, much less an altar to the unknown god. What they believe is undergirded by nothing … Instead, you must do what Jesus did when opposing those who are incapable of acting in good faith – you hold them in derision. That is Christlike.”
I don’t usually use slang words for parts of the reproductive system, but I felt it necessary here to drive home the points, given how proud some men are of these parts. Plus, I’ve been waiting for months to find a place where I could work in the word “kirigami” in relation to male-to-“female” transsexuals!
Since the issue of meter in isolated places has come up before, it appears that we scan meter differently; perhaps it’s regional. For me, I read it, “THROUGH some AM-ish STY-le SHUNN-ing.”
Wow, Josh, this is a “no-holds-barred” poem of just about every identifiable, disgraceful thing about leftist ideology. You launch zinger after zinger and score many a hit. I admire the dexterity of your rhymes and as Joe mentions, your use of tetrameter and its locomotive quality does indeed give the work a real fierceness.
Thank you Brian! I’m glad you like it so much!
Given the form, I knew the end-rhymes would be pulling all the weight (much like the repeating end-words in a sestina), so I had to make every rhyme count by saving the most powerful words for the ends of lines.
(See my reply to Joe’s comment for where the idea came from.)
Your piece reminds me of Lincoln’s frequent saying: “I must laugh; otherwise I would cry.” You turn the world-destroying insanity into a showpiece for mild, if sardonic, laughter by evoking the carnival sideshow — ridiculing the ridiculous.
I was, however, dismayed that the editors insulted Bozo by using his photo for a poem about leftists. (Although I give them credit for using WGN’s Bob Bell as Bozo — the only *real* Bozo.)
Thank you, Adam. It’s true. Sometimes we have to laugh to avoid crying about the horrors of the modern world.
I’ll bet, Joshua, that you could have gone on for another thirty stanzas — there’s that much material to work with!
Yes, one could write an epic about it, at least as long as those of Homer!