Recent Presidential misstatements and distortions of American politics and policies are disturbing -- and I have pulled from my shelf a literary anthology This Is What America Looks Like. published in 2021 by the Washington Writers Publishing House and containing fiction and poetry from writers in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. (Purchase is available at amazon.com.) In this collection I found, in the poem "D.C." by Donald Illich, the phrase "here, where presidents lied" -- and since the poem contains a couple of quantitative words, I offer it below:
D.C. by Donald Illich
I'd never seen rats
crawl down city streets
until I came here,
where presidents lied,
and people knew
how to take the fifth.
Now I fib with the best
of them, to my partner,
about where I was
and who I was with,
to my boss, who thought
I was sick for a week,
to the sky and the ground,
which believed one day
my promise to end in them.
The rats understood.
They twitched the truth,
hid their falsehoods,
Just before they ran
across my booted feet,
they squealed blood
inside their fat bodies,
left their feces
outside my door.
Let us work for a better future!
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