Tom Daley
Fiat
The whiskers of the poster paint
stipple the customs agents.
Clamor moors the lackeys,
the priests of compliance.
A fugitive light nears its eclipse;
the nation thickens its peel.
In the aerial photo, refusals crowd the square
like names in a pointillist landscape.
They have already forgotten
their Chief and his record expulsions.
Forgotten that he too proposed a wall,
sanctified arrests, incarceration of whistleblowers.
But He was deliberate, mandatory, polite.
The new guy crazes like cracks in raku.
Problem: The glazes are running together.
Time to empty the kiln.
Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.
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