The politician roared,<\/p>\n
His lips swollen with alphabet soup.<\/p>\n
\n
Adherents heard him say, \u201cChallenge,\u201d though their feet burned on the infernal asphalt and their razor gazes slashed this three-piece suit on a sizzling stage.<\/p>\n
They smelled his smoky words, tasting them like passing perfume in an elevator, stale and repellant.<\/p>\n
\n
\u201cI am Sir Ellwin Darwin of Pointless Promontory, outside the state of Michigan, and I am here to fleece you of your vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crowd cheered and dared him to shed his swimsuit.<\/p>\n
But he only whispered, \u201cI never wanted to be here. It just ended up that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
The crowd discombobulated, their spirits rising once the brainstorm rushed in.<\/p>\n
One mother gave her tiny son the peace-out sign, while a bystander heard her say, \u201cYou know what that means.\u201d<\/p>\n
And all I could make of it was the throttling gurgle of love\u2014a peace sign, wrapped in a finger-shaped heart, a violent cry for help.<\/p>\n
\n
Then the mouther of promises levitated above the crowd, and Piggy was not impressed. She, leader of the church of disbelief, set her cup down and knew the ending: they will return to earth but never be grounded, like a hydrogen barge out to sea.<\/p>\n
\n
I\u2019d give them my lunch money if I didn\u2019t have to walk to school. Mais, alas, en fin, je ne sais quoi\u2014politics and me never broke bread on a Sunday morning. Yeast lies, as untrustworthy as a sunken balloon.<\/p>\n
\n
And yet, here we are, you, me, the shouting floater, mother, child, neighbor, and countrymen, sweltering under the weight or wordlessness, a nightmare history will look back on in astonishment and then repeat itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The politician roared, His lips swollen with alphabet soup. Adherents heard him say, \u201cChallenge,\u201d though their feet burned on the infernal asphalt and their razor gazes slashed this three-piece suit on a sizzling stage. They smelled his smoky words, tasting them like passing perfume in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129201,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129174\/revisions\/129201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}