Charles W. Brice
Sweet and Low for the Brain
We keep confusing wealth with virtue.
They aren’t the same, right?
The seventy-one year old man with orange hair,
the duck wave in front… .
Wait, his appearance means nothing, but we think about his appearance.
Still, the orange ruminant regurgitates, eats his cud, regurgitates.
His followers sop it up amain. How many stomachs does he have?
How many stomachs do we have?
We think in slogans now:
Make America great again, Crooked Hillary—
all the branding, but it’s not branding. Branding is his word.
It’s name calling. I keep forgetting.
Racism is freedom. Do I have that right?
Orange is the new white. I think. I’m not sure.
I don’t know what America is. I don’t know what it means.
We watch TV. We watch TV. We watch TV.
We get sound bites. No, that’s their word. We speak in tiny sentences,
no, in phrases, pithy phrases. That’s what a sound bite is.
We speak in incomplete thoughts. Incompleteness sells.
We romance flash and splash.
Look at his cufflinks. Don’t look at his cufflinks.
They don’t matter. His hair doesn’t matter. His airplanes don’t matter.
His daughter doesn’t matter. His son-in-law doesn’t matter.
We sleep in flimsy blankets of stupidity.
We awake and wonder what he’s done today.
We watch TV. I feel so embarrassed…for us.
Our president sells George Washington
and Robert E. Lee: A two for one deal.
He sells Nazis and white supremacists and
those who protest against them. There’s a market for that
thought because it isn’t thought. It’s thought substitute—
Sweet & Low for the brain.
Charles W. Brice is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (WordTech Editions, 2016) and Mnemosyne’s Hand (WordTech Editions, 2018). His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, Chiron Review, The Dunes Review, SLAB, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Sport Literate, The Paterson Literary Review, VerseWrights, and elsewhere.
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