On Marco Rubio: There is a spider I have seen
A Poem in Honor of the Proud “Paladin” of Mar-a-Lago
There is a spider I have seen,
I do not know it’s type,
It builds a tangled web, its sheen
Is star-spangled sting and hype.
This nasty spider sings a song
And swears it will not bite.
But each time it mixes right from wrong
Chomps! — when hid from spotlights.
I took some Raid and sprayed it,
But it squawked,
“That isn’t fair!
I called that man a con artist,
But the documents can’t be there!”
(they were hidden in his hair)
I wanted to arrest Hillary for exactly what Trump did
My name is Marco Rubio, plz support my Senate bid.”
- Tom Tordillo © 2022
Poetry about contemporary events was once common. Rabindranath Tagore, Henry David Thoreau, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, P.B. Shelley, Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Pushkin…so many of the greats (all available to read for free courtesy of Project Gutenberg) assumed weaving current affairs into their poetry to be a natural expression of their authentic style.
I will not pretend my doggerel is ‘great’ — it’s mostly a rhyming frown. My purpose is to condense feelings of frustration. It is frustrating that calling a person a ‘hypocrite’ simply increases their name recognition.
In 2015–2016, Marco Rubio claimed that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials made her a danger to America, and may have even been criminal. He joined Trump’s lock her up chorus.
…the far-right Floridian was especially worked up in 2016 about Hillary Clinton — and her emails. The former secretary of state, Rubio said, “left sensitive and classified national security information vulnerable to theft and exploitation by America’s enemies. Her actions were grossly negligent, damaged national security, and put lives at risk.”
Source: Steve Benen, Aug 11, 2022, MSNBC
This is the same senator who called Donald Trump a con artist in 2016. The same senator who voted for the Director of the FBI that raided Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago.
If the FBI acted improperly, then Trump (and Rubio) appointed many of the people who did that.
Nobody on that side of the aisle will care. Nobody on that side of the aisle will hear. Nobody on that side of the aisle will read anything save what came from that side of the aisle. Nobody will remember.
So why write a poem about this?
To be honest, I hope I am following the lead of greater poets, and just practicing my skills. Toying with a piece of Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest of the great American poets who, so far as I’m aware, never wrote a single line commenting on public affairs or politics.
The reference to spiders is interesting as well: in Florida, Black Widows are endemic (as they are pretty much everywhere else in the world), and Brown Recluses are new. Given the probability that a man of Latino descent and a Black woman may face each other in November, it seemed improper to refer to either explicitly…which in turn led to thinking of the first two lines.
Beyond that, there’s nothing compelling in this poem. Just practicing the effort to hone feelings into words.
