Welcome, 2025. Hope we all survive.

 

A POEM FOR SOME GUY

 

You didn’t speak the language and you didn’t know the score.

You made the team, you got the ball, but the rules had changed.

You met a guy who knew a guy who might have seen it happen.

You walked the walk, you talked the talk, but you got there a minute too late.

You said you thought it was okay, but you didn’t, not really.

You laughed in all the right places but the smile never reached your eyes.

You said you were concerned, you were thinking about it, you would study

the issues, but you really just meant “no.”

You were going to get to the bottom of it, shine a light on it, illuminate the truth,

but you just ended up ordering take-out instead.

You looked at the world with a piercing gaze, but only saw what you wanted to see.

You thought if you just kept walking you’d find yourself in a better place,

with more options and greater insight, but you were really just a few more miles

down the same road.

You thought if you got more it would be enough, but it was not enough,

it was not better, it was just more.

 

So now you still don’t know who you really are, or what you really need,

or where you are really going, but you are still hell-bent on getting there.

 

Carry on.

 

--Lynn Skordal (1/10/25)

Modern Gods

"Modern Gods," 2025 Lynn Skordal

Mixed media collage (hand-cut lettering, vintage photos) on found framed print.

16"h x 22"w

 

For It Is In Giving That We Receive.

Let's give a little love and kindness this Christmas.

 

A Queasy Interregnum (thank you, Robert Reich...)

They Huddled Together and Watched It Happen

Lynn Skordal, 2012, cut & paste collage

 

If Someone Shows You Who They Are, Believe Them

I

Ile des Femmes Gigantesque

Lynn Skordal, 2012

 

The Best and the Worst

(Blah Blah, 2023 Lynn Skordal)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

--William Butler Yeats

 

Okay, I'm Pissed.

I really didn't believe this was going to happen.  We have now willingly entrusted our future to a man who during his last four-year term as President increased the national debt by 40%, presided over the biggest single-year increase in homicides (2020), bungled our response to Covid leading directly to hundreds of thousands needless American deaths, presided over a net loss of 2.9 million American jobs, turned the White House into his own personal cash cow (charging the Secret Service over $1 million for the privilege of staying at his properties while they protected him, for example), let the government bungle its way into a total shutdown three different times, separated more than 5,000 children from their families at the US/Mexican border with no plans to reunite them, reneged on his promise to give American families a $4,000 "pay raise" in the form of tax cuts and instead helped billionaires double their wealth, labelled climate change "a hoax" and pulled out of the Paris climate accord, rolled back more than 100 environmental protections, tried (but failed) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, buddied up to Russia's Putin and exchanged what he described as "love letters" with North Korea's strongman dictator, referred to fallen US service members as "losers and suckers," presided over a huge rollback of women's rights including the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and continuously denigrated and attacked women over and over again, both in the form of actual physical assault and verbal abuse.

The Love Song of Donald J. Trump, 2017 Lynn Skordal

We knew this and yet we voted for him anyway.

America, we deserve what's coming.