January 6th Inserection

Jerry Bradley

March 1, 2021

they rose from their chthonic beds that morning

to hear the president, a circumcised Zeus,

endorse the enemies of the state

a legion of mopes and moldwarps

violently bent on preserving

heroic versions of themselves

but Heraclitus understood the betrayal

of sad places, how a man never rises

from the same bed twice

their leader, however, could not calculate

anything beyond the half-life of marriage,

would not guard the very institutions

he had sworn to defend;

it was all Greek to him –

or something so much less

Jerry Bradley is University Professor of English and the Leland Best Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Lamar University. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he is the author of 9 books including Collapsing into Possibility. He is poetry editor of Concho River Review.