The Bastards Always Win (But I'm Still Here)

Lately, I can’t shake the nausea.

Not from illness, not from age. From this—this rotted, belching moment in American public life where the worst people you know are not just winning but rewriting the fucking rules to ensure they always will.

I grew up believing in a thing called checks and balances. Not in some Boy Scout pledge kind of way, but in that weary, pragmatic way Black folks understand—where we hope the system works while knowing full well it was never designed with us in mind. Still, it was supposed to creak and groan and maybe stop a tyrant or two.

Now? It's a punchline. A high school bully with government clearance, enabled by cowards in robes and grifters in Congress. A bully, mind you, who would’ve folded if someone just smacked him on the playground in '68.

And yeah, I'm talking about that bully. The orange one. The one whose every word is like a drunk uncle stumbling into a library and setting it on fire. But it’s not just him. It’s the system that's genuflected before him. The "free press" that treats his tantrums like breaking news. The judges who play dumb. The billionaires who write laws behind tinted glass and armed guards.

I'm angry—furious, in fact—that the term woke has become a sneer. A slur. A cudgel. Imagine that. Being awake to the pain of others, to injustice, to history—and that's the insult now? Caring is an offense. Empathy is a punchline. The moral arc of the universe was supposed to bend toward justice, but it feels like it’s snapped in two and someone's using it to beat a librarian.

They’re banning books again. Books about Ruby Bridges. About Rosa. About queer kids and autistic kids and immigrant families and what it means to live outside the myth of "normal."
Because they know if you kill the story, you can kill the people who carry it.

And they are mean, these people. Not wrong. Not misguided. Mean. They delight in destruction. They get off on cruelty. They mock trans kids, treat poor people like pests, legislate women back into silence.

And me? I’m just here. A 50-something divorcé with a blog and too much memory.
Watching a nation that promised to get better sprint in reverse with the engine roaring and the back window blacked out.

It’s helplessness with a side of heartbreak.
But I wrote a poem anyway.

---

An Elegy for the Republic (Or, “The Bastards Always Win”)

The brutes are back, and dressed in ties,
Their mouths are steel, their hearts are lies.
They talk of “greatness,” puff and preen—
Yet foul the air and call it clean.

A bully rules with jester’s smirk,
His tongue a cudgel, hands still jerked
By ghosts of men who cracked the whip,
And now just tweet with power trips.

They cry out “woke!” with spittle flung,
As if compassion were unsung,
As if to care were some disease—
A kindness needing quarantine.

The court, once black-robed, now looks red,
And nods while freedom plays dead.
Checks and balances? A quaint old phrase—
Like jazz or peace or lunchroom trays.

History's pages now are torn,
Rewritten clean by those who scorn
The blood, the bones, the bitter cries
Of those who dared to organize.

They've banned the books, they burn the truth,
They spit on grief and mock the youth.
They smirk at Black and trans and poor,
Then pass a bill to hurt them more.

No villainy too small to try,
No cruelty too dumb to fly.
They grin, they gloat, they fundraise more—
On every woman they ignore.

What strange machine, what rusted gears
Turns hope to ash and rage to tears?
This government of ghouls and boasts
Could haunt the dreams of kinder ghosts.

So here’s a toast, in bile and gin,
To fighting hard and rarely winning.
They’ll never care. They’ll never learn.
But damn it—watch this table burn.

We are the heart they’d have to steal.
We’re not a myth. We’re fucking real.

---

I don’t know what good it does to scream into the void anymore. But I still believe, in my marrow, that the scream matters.
The scream keeps the truth alive.
The scream reminds someone else they’re not crazy.
The scream might even, just maybe, echo into something like action.

So here it is. My scream.
Join in if you need to.