Introduction to Misfit 36

As I write this our disgraced, twice impeached, now indicted, former president is entering a New York court room to face questions regarding a civil suit brought by the Attorney General of the State of New York regarding routinely filing false property valuation documents in order to fraudulently receive bank loans among other nefarious schemes. His previous appearance, regarding this case, resulted in 400 plus Fifth Amendment pleas. The only drama here is whether he will beat his previous record of fifth amendment citations or, foolishly, self-incriminate by actually answering questions. I’m betting on the former.
           
His prior appearance in New York court room, just last week, resulted in a particularly glum cameo to plead not guilty to felony falsifying business records and campaign finance violations regarding hush payments to a porn star he had a brief relationship with. The plea felt pro forma given he has to appear in New York at the end of the month regarding a defamation suit brought by a woman who claimed he raped her in Bergdorf’s many years prior to today. He claimed she wasn’t his type, as if that mattered somehow, but was unable to differentiate between the victim and his former second wife, Marla Maples, when shown a picture of her at the time of the assault.  If Ms. Carroll, the accuser doesn’t bankrupt him, the Attorney General surely will if she prevails. Her suit carries with It a “death sentence” for the Trump Corps ability to do business in the city as in a five-year suspension of the company’s ability to conduct real estate business in N.Y. Good luck coming back from that. Attorney General James previously succeeded in shutting down the personal Trump charity for misusing funds for personal purposes.

And it wall goes downhill legally from there for the “one man crime wave” (according to Jeremy Raskin). The really serious stuff follows: ranging from stealing government documents, an almost open and shut case, and election interference he was caught on tape engineering. And then it gets really, really serious for The Orange Nightmare, as the Justice Department investigates an assertion, he showed stolen document maps to unauthorized people (as in showing them off in a non-secure area i.e. the Mara Loco dining room) which carries it with it a very stuff mandatory prison sentence and is only a few baby steps short of treason.  Most serious of all is the investigation into wire fraud regarding his fund raising off of the knowingly false election claims which could totally eliminate his favorite way of capitalizing on crime by deceiving his gullible supporters.  The attempted coup stuff is just a tip for the jailers.  Hello Super Max.

I wish.

Well, maybe not Super Max, but these current charges all have great potential for NFT: The Arraignments Series. Collect them all.  If he can sell himself as a super hero why not as a predicate felon? I’m in. I’m sure others will be too even if they are like me and don’t really get what the point of an NFT is.  

Non fungible, as in, basically, not existing in the real world but in some ethereal cloud space, alternate reality, is just one of the many examples of how we have all gradually slipped into an alternative universe. Is what Camus wrote about in The Rebel asserting life is basically absurd;   that we are enduring an existential crisis, an endless cycle of authoritarian dystopia.  To combat this free form absurdity, malaise, dread, etc. is why we write and read poetry. We have a wide, eclectic range of poets representing all kinds of diversity in voice, tone, and intent. There are the deeply personal poetry of sexual assault to the wildly experimental of Cook and hastain with a little bit of everything else in between.

I can’t thank Jennifer Lagier enough for her unstinting work behind the scenes doing the grunt work that makes each issue possible.  Gene McCormick may have “retired” as full time art editor of Misfit but you can see his cover art on forthcoming books by both Jennifer and myself in Kelsay Books releases later this year (among other fine poets such as long time contributors Charles Rammelkamp and Robert Cooperman among others).

And most of all thank you for reading and submitting. There is no forum without an audience and participants.