Speaking Facetiously
Look at all the things I’m doing,
Stopping trouble while it’s brewing.
Midterms bring my party danger,
Turning winners into traitors.
I have made the country stronger:
Let me stay a little longer.
Keep elections out of reach,
For if we lose, who gets impeached?
— zumwalt (Jan. 2026)
The Greenland saga continues to intensify, and this Zumwalt poem addresses the latest escalation of targeted tariffs, contrasting the gravity of the situation with a bit of humor. Given the history of Greenland with its European associations going back to the 10th century, Zumwalt chose a poetic style common to English speakers of that era: Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter.
“Grēnland unfæst” is the latest published Zumwalt poem, published today at New Verse News: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/01/grenland -unfst-greenland-off-balance.html
This is the third consecutive month that Zumwalt has had a work published at New Verse News and the second day in a row a Zumwalt poem has been published in a literary journal.
Large Language Model Limerick
This poet has run out of drink,
With no further incentive to think,
So a prompt-driven app
Now spits out my crap,
Spewing poems as I watch my brain shrink.
No More Cornborers
My steel-wool scrubbed & Comet-clean spuds
grate with injurious gusto
Protect the enamel at all costs!
And a sheen is added to our distended
esophagus.
Wintry blasts of fluoride and chlorophyll
attack the waste
But only further pollute the abused
frame.
Death enters the corridors, stalking stealthily
in the Ajax-whiteness.
All is blinding! There is no more gray!
Josephine is become a slaughter-baron.
Ammonia chokes us all
—Zumwalt
[1981?]
Donroe Doctrine
He lied about what was in store,
To launch a swift, two-hour war.
But our boss won’t explain,
Now we’re in for more pain
in a far away place,
In a very messy state
with a lengthy, complicated, intricate case
of having much, much more on our plate
than we ever should have ever,
ever,
ever
asked for.
— zumwait (Jan. 2026)
Von Bock Was A Pansy
Those iron plates that churned the mud and gravel
Impress me not.
The rifled bore was, and is a crashing bore,
I shut my eyes to the breechblock and
Do not care for thermite.
I recoil from venturi.
I have only cutting remarks for the bayonet;
C.B.W. stinks.
Give me Gandhi & Walden, with a little pickle
On the side, and I am content.
Blood-red waiters make me yawn.
—Zumwalt
[Early 1980s?]
Our Free Union (With respect to André Breton)
My country with the hair of inlaid fiber-optic cable
With the thoughts of a backed up four-lane freeway at dusk
With the waist of a redwood in the center of a scenic bypass
My country with the lips of blinking Christmas lights
With lips of teabags of silt from the Great Lakes
With the teeth of a picket fence on a shifting, slumping shoreline
With the tongue of a ticker tape parade on celluloid stock
My country with the tongue of a televised courtroom
With the tongue of a satellite that spies in dark silence
With the tongue of a cracked bell that just rings and rings on command
With the eyelashes of high-tension wires
With brows of the edge of a sold-out stadium
My country with the brow of a blue light under the sheets
And of the steam rising from an executive sauna fifty stories high
My country with shoulders of interstate concrete
And of a hydroelectric dam holding back the stars
My country with fingers of a ballot box—contested, sticky, messy
Of a strewn deck of plastic cards
My country with armpits of coal dust and scented bubble tea
Of suburban sprawl and the nest of a bald eagle in a cell tower
With arms of Mississippi tributaries and of a thousand assembly lines
And of a mingling of the cornfield and ambushed migrant workers
My country with legs of elusive wildfires
With the movements of a swing state and a jazz festival
My country with calves of sequoia bark
My country with feet of broken treaties and numbered amendments
With feet of subway tracks and tourists flicking coins into canyons
My country with a neck of unharvested wheat
My country with a throat of pulsing fiber and high-powered cooling fans
Of a protest stage-shrieking in the bed of a dry river
With breasts of the Appalachian night
My country with breasts of a multi-story shopping mall
Of a ghost town shadowed by the noonday sun
My country with the belly of a thumb-scrolled digital map
With a back of an abandoned silver screen
My country with the back of a cruise ship climbing into the stratosphere
With a nape of red clay and cooling asphalt
And of the threads of a smudged napkin on a diner counter at 3:00 AM
My country with hips of a barreling NextGen Acela
With hips of a county rodeo and of Friday night tossed penalty flags
Of a pendulum swinging between fairground stand food and Michelin starred dining
My country with buttocks of Civil War reenactments
Of a buttocks of uncirculated library books
Of a buffalo nickel gifted to a grandchild
My country with the loins of an offshore drill and of grocery store pharmacy
Of prairie grass and vintage baseball cards
My country with loins of theme park hydraulic launch coasters
My country with ears full of rotating sirens
Of ears of the Great Prairies and fast food in the car
Of eyes of parabolic, steerable radio telescopes
My country with eyes of a flatscreen TV left on at night
With eyes of a forest gasping for breath…
The eyes of my country turned toward we, the people
Hands held out for an answer, cuffed and arrested for expediency.
— zumwalt (Dec. 31, 2025)
Slice-o-life, Microwaved
Askew in a vinyl cosmos
life’s beading up on
a cold tumbler
And Juan Valdez
has repossessed my mind
for the glory of Brazil
or Colombia
Some squalid country at any rate
Leaving my 33
grooves
scarred by needles at 78
several rich hits
off of
Mrs. Olsen
And Muzak sounds
like steam jets
and
dark mutterings over eggs
become berserk natterings
of rabid chipmunks
Gee Zus !
Only 12:00?
Existence is
deformed
in a
time-warp
—Zumwalt
[Night of 30 Sep-1 Oct 1981, Washington, DC]
Based on this recent news event: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/25/g-s1-103683/powerball-player-arkansas-won-jackpot
The human touch
On Christmas Eve, many just like me
stopped at the station where I get my gas
and bought slips of paper
as thin as my patience
waiting its reward.
A mile or so away in Cabot
I closed my own store,
shut down the register,
reminded by the radio of
the size of the jackpot
while I drove home
in my rusty 2003 Tacoma.
Maddie set out some sandwiches—
our light Christmas Eve meal;
two months of watching costs
earned tomorrow’s fortune of presents
paired with roasted prime rib.
That morning came, and our two children
visited us in bed to tug at us—
too small to pull us out
and not old enough to realize they hadn’t.
A delight of flung wrapping paper and
unchecked squeals energized our living room
as, with some guilt, I looked at my phone
to glimpse the weekly Powerball snub.
No ordinary loss:
promised paradise, this time,
came from the station where I staked my three bucks.
But this small defeat brought reassurance:
in a world of algorithms,
predictive apps, and AI advisers
that steal away jobs and raise energy prices
there was still one thing technology couldn’t do:
choose the right numbers.
Just published in New Verse News — Zumwalt’s new news poem, Jousting Windmills.
Click on the following URL to read poem: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2025/12/jousting-windmills.html
I will post the text here later on, but for now, let’s drive some traffic to New Verse News!
