Mr. President-elect,

I am a blues-based poet from the blue state of California

eager to heal the bipolar condition of my country

which you have so generously aggravated

with your weavily mendacious and bullet-dodging discourse,

a poetics of dehumanization that will be studied to death

in the English departments, if any, of the future.

If you appoint me to serve as your inaugural poet

I will not disappoint you, will not upstage you, will not

make a spectacle of myself yet will entertain the multitudes

with my cool, cryptopatriotic free verse

declaring independence from your presidency

while celebrating the spectacle of yourself like some monstrous

ego rising out of the East River, a grotesque avatar

of our national self-celebrator Walt Whitman,

a Brooklyn newspaperman and great queer bard of carnal America

who might recognize in you his funhouse image

and whose spirit I will channel in all its promiscuous appetite,

its hunger to devour democracy

one faith-based, low-information, alienated, burn-it-down barbarian at a time

until the deep state is razed and all that remains

is you and your team of mobsters making the nation

an offer it can’t refuse, a horse’s head

in every bed, a Big Mac on every paper plate,

a Diet Coke with deadly sweeteners in every plastic cup

and plenty of ICE. I promise to invoke the immigrants

whose deportation camps you are erecting, the women

whose bodies you have shamelessly abused, the animals

endangered by your indiscriminate drilling, the children

whose assault rifles you have promised to provide

in schools so they can defend themselves against

bad guys with guns and golfers in red baseball caps on the rampage.

My inaugural poem will eschew clichés of phony uplift

while trafficking in your patented brand of carnage,

your brilliantly unstable massacre of language,

your cast of amateurs out of central casting

whose incompetence will prove entertainingly chaotic

for those who can bear to witness their distractions.

Sir, big boss man, like-it-or-not protector, dictator

for a day, I promise to subvert the paradigm

of the presidency, clearing the way for you

to reinvent it in your image with your name in 10-foot gold-plated caps

crowning the White House roof in perpetuity.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Kessler