Throwback Thursday: ‘What Is Essential’ by Wally Swist

What the checkout clerk said burned with a new ridiculousness,
a pervasive absurdity, another torque of snarkiness,

in joking to an associate — they are no longer called colleagues —
about calling in sick while you were in the building, which buzzed

with a crackle of neon that lit up the pool in the parking lot
beneath it that was yellow with vomit then blue with rain,

that represented what was repelling about the malignancy
that entitlement is in America —

that false sense of reality at the corrupt core of the country
and the malaise of college students who protest because

they believe they have every right to get drunk and destroy
private property in a public demonstration —

crushing beer cans on other people’s lawns in the spring mud
instead of marching against war,

hunger, the new fascism in politics, bullying in the workplace,
the sickness in the very character of what is contemporary.