Charles Rammelkamp

Slang

“…a scurvy-looking cove sitting with a couple of doxies,”
I read in a detective novel set in 1719,
digging the eighteenth century patois, 
fiction my escape 
from the sledgehammer of horror
of the year in which I live, 301 later.

A sketchy-looking dude sitting with a couple of hoes.

I look up from the novel 
at the television screen,
where the current president sits
with his daughter and his wife,
a bloated, scowling man
with fake-blond hair,
candidate for a stroke,
his cosmetically-enhanced companions
all counterfeit curves and color.

I turn back to my novel,
to the eighteenth century,
not so different 
from today, I concede.