The subject
By Nick Moss
There’s a fat orange man who thinks he’s a God,
Swallows Propecia by the handful to thicken his locks,
Sits on his throne, a homophobe Liberace, sweaty
And blocked from his cheeseburger diet, thinking
The world hangs on his word.
The bone-spurred scion of slumlord money,
He’s never known a war the poor shouldn’t die in;
Pudgy fingers on a tiny hand type that most of Hamas’ “soldiers have already been killed, Most of the rest are surrounded and MILITARILY TRAPPED, just waiting for me to give the word, ‘GO,’ for their lives to be quickly extinguished. As for the rest, we know where and who you are, and you will be hunted down, and killed.”
But here’s the rub. The random angry capitals betray the real state of things.
This tangerine-painted pseudo-Shiva will pull no trigger. Will just watch on the screen as drones hover, and his hand starts to tug in bulge-eyed anticipation at his crotch. The pork barrel president of an AI-wealth World Enterprises Corporation, Newton (1) watching 200 channels, but with The Apprentice on all but one. Caught in a moment between omnipotence and impotence. Imagine him there, then imagine him gone. Hoi polloi tramps down on hoi olligoi. Mercury, God of thieves, can’t flee his palace –the wings on his sandals are just spurs of bone. Imagination is the precursor to action. If resistance can be thought, it can also be done.
NOTE
In Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film, based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien trapped on earth who becomes head of the multinational World Enterprises Corporation.
