By Steve Rodriquez
Someone whispers, the circus is in town. A dark
caravan is seen parading down the road. We might expect
to see trained lions, and the trapeze artist;
death-defiers treading a tightrope balanced high above.
Instead, we are treated to a disappearing act. Sheer scale of magic
catches everyone by surprise. Scary clowns, wearing olive drab
outfits – complete with black masks, helmets, ICE cool military swag—
pour out of their armored vehicles. Under a big top canopy
of blue coastal skies, they form three-ring spectacles
in front of restaurants, Home Depot lots, and apartment complexes.
Resembling Death Star troopers arriving far too late
for this year’s Comic Con, they begin disappearing humans
like strong-armed, Kevlar-vested magicians shoving rabbits
in and out of a top hat. Citizens observe the action.
Poof! Another body vanishes into the transfer portal.
What did these people ever do, a bystander protests?
Murders and rapists, one costumed joker responds, adding
gang member as an afterthought. Nothing slick about
these clowns-slash-illusionists. No smooth sleight of hand.
More like a fight card of UFC brawlers employing muscle
and well-rehearsed intimidating stares that peek out
from above the masks. We in the crowd feel helpless,
unable to stop this performance gone horribly awry,
all the while insisting the ringmaster answer for his debacle.
From a distance, however, indeed going all the way back
to Pennsylvania Avenue, the orange impresario can be heard hawking,
“Step right up and observe the greatest show on earth”
as another human—heart beating like a rabbit—
magically evaporates into thin coastal air.
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Author’s Gloss:
Circus—
1. a travelling company of acrobats, clowns, and other entertainers which gives performances, typically in a large tent, in a series of different places.
2. a public scene of frenetic, noisy, or confused activity.
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Steve Rodriguez is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and a retired high school English teacher. He resides in San Diego, CA. His poetry has recently appeared in several local anthologies, as well as The New Verse News and Beatnik Cowboy. One of his poems was recognized at the 2025 National Baseball Poetry Festival.
What a great powerful poem. Thank you.
It reminds me of a story in today’s LA Times. Kenis Adalberto Lopez, a Nicaraguan man who had lived under legal asylum in the United States for many years, was recently detained at his routine immigration check-in. Lopez became one of more than 25,000 people to be deported by Trump to “third countries” — which are usually impoverished, African and get half a billion dollars from the U.S.A. to accept our human cargo.
In this instance, Lopez and some others among the 42 prisoners fought back on a Texas tarmac, and resisted climbing aboard the waiting jet plane. Asking to know where they were being sent and weeping, Lopez said, “I’d rather die here than in Africa.” Lopez was subdued by immigration agents with pepper-spray, shackled, handcuffed and restrained for the entire 24-hour trip to Bangui, the capitol of the Central African Republic, a troubled country where Lopez is truly a stranger.
This draconian Trump program recently has been stayed by a federal appeals court for failing to give deportees an opportunity to legally challenge their removal to third countries. The Trump Administration vows to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Nicaraguan Lopez and his fellow deportees from Iran, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, live under armed guard in Bangui, Central African Republic, just across a river from Congo.
The Guardian newspaper has just reported a U.S. Supreme Court decision (6 to 3 ) that allows Trump to continue deportations of migrants to “third countries,” regardless of their lack of linguistic or cultural connection to the receiving nation. A federal appeals court had
called a stop to the practice last week, but the decision was appealed and Trump won.
“…Another human — heart bearing like a rabbit — magically evaporates into thin…air.”
No, it’s not a circus. Wrong word to use to describe what is going on, it minimizes what should be a very real sense of abject horror.
I went to a circus when I was a kid. I was really little and I don’t remember much about it, but the pieces/pictures in my head bring up emotions of happy, that it was a blast for a little kid and fun as hell.
What is going on in this country now is just hell, or maybe it’s the first stage of hell, with the sadistic masked stormtroopers enjoying their brute power. This is where this ends up if it isn’t stopped:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/02/when-law-legitimates-the-machinery-of-authoritarianism/
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And a look at WHY the ruling elite uses these kind of distractions to keep the public’s eyes off of them:
https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cclxv-elite-responses-to-the-architecture-of-collapse-part-5a1ad0770208
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sealintheSelkirks
Dude, lighten up a little; geez! It was a poem and analogy and …. (in the meantime, get that safehouse ready)
Yeah, I know, try to let a little more light back into the darkness that is swirling around and suffocating all of us. I get that.
The poem was well-written, and obviously it definitely impacted me. It’s what this kind of poem is supposed to do, engage the reader, yes?
But honestly, could the current reality that we are living in be what it was like for the intelligent educated people living in 1933 Germany as the darkness of Fascism crushed the entire society? I’ve read books written by people who lived through Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and so many other countries. They all give the same kind of warning about what we are seeing happening across this country now. Some days one can hardly breathe, ya know?
I have a book still on the shelves, the only one with a Swastika on the red cover, titled ‘They Thought They Were Free,’ the germans 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the U of Chicago Press Ltd. London, in 1955. It was one of my university history classes required reads, and it went on the shelf as a keeper instead of back to the student bookstore. I kept it as a warning to myself seeing what Reagan had wrought on the psyche of the US in his 8 years as president.
It’s like a primer for what is going on now, how the rightwing authoritarian ‘average guy’ is acting and blatantly buying into the program the Fascists are putting out while their leaders enrich themselves. The lack of critical thinking, the ability to just ignore really bad things being done by your own government, turning a blind eye to it, exulting over the violence of those ‘others’ that they see being crushed by the State. It’s as if the book is a paperback snapshot, a glimpse, of how a huge segment of people in the US are thinking…and where it led to.
As for your comment ‘get that safehouse ready,’ that isn’t even funny, dude. I know people that have recently left the country, like the early exodus of jews in early 30s Germany. Too much is riding on this midterm election, and it’s shaky as hell while the fraud is already working to stop any change to the ‘program’ that the Fascists are implementing.
The banality of evil (the Dark Side or so says Obi-Wan) is the ignorant of history citizens of this country don’t care to know anything about.
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Trump Is Building an Election Trap, and Millions of Americans May Not See It Until It’s Too Late
From missing mail to armed federal agents and sweeping voter investigations, the warning signs suggest a democracy being squeezed before Americans even reach the ballot box…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-is-building-an-election-trap-e51?utm
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I still say the movie Idiocracy was a documentary and not a comedy. Remember, plants love Brawndo because it has ‘lectrolights.’ There are millions of 2-legged plants in this country sucking down the Brawndo as I type…
Meditation helps as does walking with the two dogs through the woods around this property with the funny old lady cat following along behind trying to be part of it. Watching the conifers sway in the wind or sitting outside staring up at the center of our small galaxy turning above my head in the very dark night sky in these mountains is quite centering, too. Somedays it almost makes me dizzy, though, because I think I can feel myself and the earth turning. Especially when I’m standing and watching the moon come up over the ridge looming above the property. I know it’s an optical illusion…
We all do as best we can, Frank. Big sigh.
sealintheSelkirks
I’m serious