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?)
White Russians with White Vodka
The sky peers out over
its trailing cape, wide and pallid,
obscuring the meridian,
erasing the horizontal arguments
of Kamchatka avenues.
Don’t check your map:
it will look much the same as in summer;
it won’t show flurries,
blizzards, cyclones,
meter upon meter
of accumulated snowbanks—
You will not see the swallowed
Lada Grantas, Kia Rios,
Toyota Prados, Cherry Tiggos.
Once one could have turned on a TV
late at night
and seen snow—
now politicians,
talking heads,
social media
whitewash and whitenoise us
non-stop:
ultimately,
we will be head deep,
unable to plow out,
and even Kamchatka
will seem like
a tropical paradise.
–zumwalt (January 2026)
Based on today’s news https://asianmail.in/2026/01/19/record-breaking-snowfall-in-russia-extreme-snow-buries-towns-in-kamchatka/ and this dVerse post’s call to action: https://dversepoets.com/2026/01/20/poetics-new-year-snow/
Concept of a Plan
Here is “The Great Healthcare Plan,”
The finest concept known to man.
No need to think of how this works
Or who this helps and who this hurts.
This policy is the greatest, most wonderful healthcare dream,
The biggest savings anyone has ever known or seen.
We’ll slash the drugs, making deals with forced consent,
By three hundred, four hundred — five hundred percent!
We can’t pay off the middle men,
That’s up to you to do, my friend.
If you need more to make you well,
Then just follow our plan,
straight to…
well…
straight to where I might one day dwell.
— zumwalt (January 2026)
News stories:
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/15/nx-s1-5678654/trump-great-healthcare-plan-video-announcement-aca-premiums https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/trump-health-care-plan
A sure bet
The pick and roll is part of play,
And catch what coach has got to say.
But there’s a more important task:
Collecting bags of major cash.
You miss the shot, you miss the rim,
While placing bets outside the gym.
We take the bribe to slip and fall,
No cap, it’s part of basketball.
We fill the jerseys up with green,
The wildest flex you’ve ever seen.
We pray the Feds don’t watch the game,
Or we’ll get cooked and take the blame.
It’s great to hang with looks that slay,
To drive the whips and soak the rays.
To hit the clubs and play the field,
To party hard and never yield.
But danger lurks in losing games,
Not from the fans or public shame:
Don’t leave behind some mid-wit tell,
That turns your set-up into some
cringey,
grungy,
hoopless cell.
— zumwalt (January 2026)
New Story:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/sport/basketball-charges-gambling-scheme
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.
“take this” is the latest published Zumwalt poem, published today at Ink Sweat & Tears: https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/zumwalt/
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?]
