Danny Shot
Catching Your Breath in a Burning House
My politics can be summed up
in two words: Anti Fascist
or Antifa if you insist on one.
We’re not supposed to talk politics
at the high school reunion.
Fine. We’ll skip the reunion.
We’ll meet where we can laugh,
in another town, perhaps another time.
We’re not permitted to call them fascists anymore,
but their boots echo louder, shiny and stomping
through the halls of media giants,
corridors of white shoe law firms,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
through classrooms and dormitories,
into your child’s consciousness.
You ask what does courage looks like?
It’s not a cape, or a championship belt.
It’s definitely not a gun.
Maybe a weary janitor
refusing to mop up blood
that wasn’t an accident.
It could be a talk show host
unwilling to be silenced.
Sometimes it’s a librarian
who leaves banned books
where kids can find them.
We’ve seen this movie before,
in Berlin, Moscow, Imperial Japan,
Charlottesville, Kabul, Jerusalem.
Fascism and violence march lockstep
hand in hand, call it genocide if you dare.
The subways still run, gas is cheap,
the Marvel Universe remains intact,
Tech stocks soar to Olympian heights,
My Brechtian Day
“Don’t start with the good old things,
but the bad new ones,”
he said in my dream last night.
So, here’s to Amazon warehouses,
banks foreclosing our neighbors,
to poets writing grant proposals, and
congress collecting unearned pay.
To killer drones from outer space,
to Karoline Leavitt’s lyin’ eyes –
dollar signs shining in expectation
of upcoming tell all book deal.
To factories reopened as condos,
same smokestacks, new rooftop bars,
to the War Department’s illegal strikes,
brought to you by the same folks
who think “What could ever go wrong?”
Mother Courage reminds us
that profit comes at a cost:
“And in our graves we shall find peace
unless the war goes on in Hell.”
Maybe the show goes on in the grocery
store line, where the self-checkout counters
silently judge our scruples or lack thereof,
in the landlord’s texts, sent from a yacht
named Mar a Lago.
Bertolt, you’d laugh at us,
at our irony so thick it’s tragic.
Show the audience the strings,
but make them dance anyway.
The show must go on –
in the eyes of the security guard
posted in front of the synagogue,
wondering if he too is part
of the performance,
in the tired faces of teenagers
staring at overworked screens
anxiously awaiting whatever
Act Two might have in store –
probably audience participation, and
no one looks forward to that day.
Shrugged Shoulders
He lies to the camera
with the confidence of a man
who’s never been told no.
They know he’s lying,
we know he’s lying,
he knows he’s lying.
We shrug our shoulders
once again and move on.
Her voice polished
like the golden cross
emblazoned on her chest,
the perfect spokeswoman
gurgling up a fantasy unrelated
to any semblance of reality.
We make jokes about them,
the way people joke about
a dimwitted cousin
or a leak in the roof –
ha ha, very funny,
until that cousin gets a gun,
until the ceiling caves in.
Everyone knows –
the bartender, the soccer mom,
bus driver, small-town mayor,
factory worker, waitress, barista,
guidance counselor, fashion designer,
We all know, knowing is easy here.
Doing is hard. So we shrug, make jokes,
pretend the cracks in the wall are part
of the décor and truly let the light shine in.
The streetlights buzz their nervous hum,
in this haunted place we live
in this country we let happen.
We smile, we nod, hands in pockets,
walking perpetual streets of shrugged
shoulders, waiting for someone else
to throw the first punch.
Unseen Men in Unseen Vans
In the heat-wave streets of domestic
“war zones” where bodegas hum
and children skip rope between
potholes and broken English dreams,
they came – unmarked like a reprise
of a 20th century nightmare scene.
Masks, protective vests, guns drawn,
ICE badges stitched into plain clothes,
not even the judges recognize
the law they claim to be.
They don’t knock.
They don’t speak the language.
They gesture with gloved hands
signaling you, you, and you,
like choosing meat at a butcher shop.
A woman screams in Spanish.
A child clutches a Spiderman backpack
as if it will make her invisible.
Ask yourself: who profits?
These men, these shadows of a state
that denies its own shadow –
they do not act alone.
Who will obey el jefe’s orders
to arrest Chicago’s mayor
or the Governor of Illinois?
Most likely some asshole from
Texas sent north in uniform
to invade another state.
How broken must a man be
to turn on his fellow men
and women and how did
he ever sink to that level
of cold desperation?
Danny Shot’s new collection of poems, The Jersey Slide was published in the fall of 2025 by CavanKerry Press. His prose, collected in Night Bird Flying was published in February 2025 by Roadside Press. WORKS was published in 2018 also by CavanKerry Press. Danny is a New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (2024-Lifetime), and Poet in Residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. Danny Shot was the longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. More information can be found on his website: dannyshot.com