Denial #poetry #Earthweal

Hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, now
that’s cool:
somebody told me it should be
Lago-a-Mar
that’s what will happen to Florida;
haven’t a clue what she meant
and she certainly didn’t have a pussy worth grabbing
women like that should not be seen or heard
the rest of women should only be seen:
You hear me, boys?
Me, a loser?
How much are you worth?
How many golf courses, hotels and apartment blocks do you own?
The fuck do you know!
I decide who loses…

© Experimentsinfiction 2020, All Rights Reserved

About this poem

I wrote ‘Denial’ for Earthweal’s weekly challenge. Jim is hosting this week and has given us the following instructions:

‘THE CHALLENGE is to write a poem from the point of view of someone who is a climate change denier or a climate solution denier or someone who just doesn’t care because they won’t be around when it happens. 

Choose any form you like, or go with free verse. Create a fictional character, preferably, because that’s more fun and is liberating. the key is to provide some insight into what makes the character tick, how they arrived at that point of view.  An out of work pipe welder, for example, will have a completely different view of oil pipelines than a climate activist. What’s the character’s motivation — self- interest, livelihood, fear, dislike of liberals, or just likes his/her car? You can make the character sympathetic or not. Use satire if you want, but remember there’s a thin line between satire and snark, a line I’ve crossed many times.  You don’t have to necessarily mention climate change in the poem, it’s enough to allude to it or create a profile of a character who would have climate change denial as part of his/her world view.’

It was easy for me to imagine a character deep in the throes of denial. The biggest imaginative leap for me was imagining that this character was literate enough to write a poem of any kind.