For Name’s Sake
A center that bore a great leader’s name,
A symbol of culture, of merit, of fame,
Now carries a brand that’s suspect and lame:
So artists avoid it, along with its shame.
Now our president posts it’s time to shut down;
“No one rejects ME,” he thinks with a frown.
“Time to remodel — I’ll teach this whole town,
I may not be nice, but I DO wear the crown!”
— zumwalt (February 2026)
“Frustration with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is mounting among House Republicans over her response to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.”
Reference: https://www.axios.com/2026/01/28/republicans-congress-noem-impeachment
Not Cricket
A gal who once led DHS
Made up lies while under duress;
When the videos came,
She had no one to blame,
Except for the power of the press.
— zumwalt (01/2026)
Proud to announce that Commuter Lit has published Zumwalt’s recent poem, Interstate Nocturne:
Please visit: https://commuterlit.com/2026/02/tuesday-interstate-nocturne/!
“The Justice Department filed charges Thursday against a man who allegedly tried to spray Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with a substance from a syringe during a town hall in Minneapolis this week. Trump said in an interview with ABC News that Omar ‘probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.’”
Hoax of a Hoax
Trump slandered Omar by name,
With hateful words fanning the flame.
A man sprayed her face,
Got charged in this case—
Please tell me, who’s truly to blame?
I am honored to announce that Zumwalt’s recent poem, “take this,” has been selected by the editors of Ink Sweat and Tears as one of their six nominees for pick of the month.
You can read all six selections here:
https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/january-2026-pick-of-the-month/
After reading, if you wish to vote just click on the Vote Here URL that is shown before the text of the six entries.
Gibbon and Toynbee bump into Spengler at Starbucks
Steel glass shafts
Glint skyward
Glittering silver deceptively erect
Yet reality is whispered
With salient impotence
In sequins, basking
They are ripe for a gaudy technicolor cave-in
To a Muzak score
Rotten props, rotten struts, rotten foundations
Polished pillars once
We’ve lost the varnish
And revel in the grease-spots
And ember-burns
While concealing our leprous nudity
in faded Purple
Thus we pursue Byzantium
At a break-neck stagger into the nitre trough
To be the feast of Seljuk flies
Humming 4-chord progressions
Rotten rags, rotten flesh, rotten sensibilities
No phoenix pyre
The red of flame metamorphosed to rust
And blue-bright iron
Decays to dust
Rubble spawning weeds
And housing ravenous mandible-clapping insects
Living but to shun the day
And suck the husk
Of desiccated brains
—Zumwalt (around 1978?)
He eyed up the ice for the steal,
Which he claimed he would do with much zeal,
But now he’s retreating
From his warlike chest beating—
He calls this the art of the deal.
— zumwalt (1/22/2026, revised 1/28/2026)
“China wedding goes viral as twin brothers marry twin sisters and both sides have twin uncles.”
Relativity
Two sisters, identical twins,
Wed brothers with big matching grins.
The household now shares
Their uncles in pairs,
But that’s not where chaos begins.
— zumwalt (1/22/2026)
“President Donald Trump, on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, scrapped the tariffs that he threatened to impose on eight European nations to press for U.S. control over Greenland, pulling a dramatic reversal shortly after insisting he wanted to get the island ‘including right, title and ownership.’”
News Story: https://apnews.com/article/trump-davos-housing-greenland-gaza-a2f3f4c18ba321c8025a3e208fc0ddf6
The Art of Repeal
He eyed up the ice for a deal,
Which he swore he could buy or would steal,
But now he’s retreating
From his warlike chest beating,
as if it had all been surreal.
— zumwalt (1/22/2026)
With the start of 1926, the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Fox Trot rage continued.
Jazz records were often given the default label of “Fox Trot.” I had the good fortune to be able to listen to several of my grandfather’s jazz 78s, with the majority of them labelled “Fox Trot” — a catch-all label for popular music that de-emphasized the more scurrilous connotations some associated with “hot jazz.”
Two such “Fox Trot” recordings of merit were of the popular song “Dinah,” written in 1925, and recorded a few times in late 1925.
This first Jan. 1926 recording, is by one of my favorite jazz ensembles, The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra:
Another notable recording of “Dinah” features the first recording of the slap bass technique (bassist Steve Brown) at around the 2:20 mark:
And here are some visuals of Fox Trot dancing captured on film — spanning the 1920s and possibly early 1930s:
And speaking of films, The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore, had its New York City premiere on January 15, 1926. This was the first film adaptation of one of the great American novels, Moby Dick, with the additional modification to the plot to, of course, include a love interest for Captain Ahab! Enough said.
And since we are on films, we have to mention that John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of a true television system in London. It wasn’t just shadows; it was a greyscale image with moving details.
Also in January 1926, physicist Erwin Schrödinger published his famous paper (Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem) containing the foundation of the Schrödinger equation: iℏ (∂Ψ/∂t) = ĤΨ. This birth of wave mechanics replaced the idea that particles revolve around the atom like sub-microscopic planets. Instead, it revealed that they behave as waves — what we now understand as clouds of probability. No one can say where an electron is; we can only calculate the likelihood of finding it at some given location as alluded to in Zumwalt’s 2011 poem, Particle Show.
Of course, I need to mention progressive rock whenever I can: George Martin, the so-called fifth Beatle, and a pivotal contributor to the Beatles’ progressive sound, and by extension, to progressive rock in general, was born on January 3, 1926.
zumpoems 