What Rough Beast | Poem for May 1, 2017

Lydia Cortes
Our Fool

A fool is a fool is a fool is a fool
Foolishly willfully telling the truth

La verdad veritas very Juan Bobo
Bobo in PR means an out of it cretin silly

Zangano drool of a tool one would think
That needs sharpening after for example

How he went and dressed up his pig in
His mama’s Sunday best including her

Most coolio chapeau the one with the veil
& flowers & the feathers when Mami said

Clean up el puerco to take to town ready
And all tidy widy for the sale so he went

And made her up all pretty with his Mamita’s
Reddest lip gloss blushed her fat cheeks

Around her neck he placed his mother’s
Good pearls on her hairy sow’s ears the

Matching earrings till she was pic pretty
He sure knew the art of The Sale no fool he

He just wanted to mess with his Mami no fool
Is a fool is a fool just like the Bard’s fool a

Telling it like it is a fool is a fool is a fool nothing
Like our fool so presidential so fast you’ll never

Believe how fast you’ll cry through the laughter
At his supreme stupidity this fool ours is not a

Fool is not a fool not a truthful revealing fool no
PR Juan Bobo no Bard Fools of The Highest

Order just a lying low life caught small red
Handed in the White House a complete a

Total a hole

 

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.

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