Ever since the world got blended
Billy don’t come round much anymore.
He told a coon joke at the Legion Hall
and no one laughed.
They thought he meant
the banded critters that
come into your campsite.
His own grandson’s married to
a coffee-colored gal from San Juan.
He calls their kid a Red Rican,
a cross between a redneck and a spic.
Choose sides already, Billy tells him,
are you a Shark or a Jet?
No one but him blames
Jew bankers
like Goldy Sachs and the Lehman boys
for the nation’s woes.
Even the rosters of the country clubs
read like a rainbow coalition.

So what’s left for an aging racist
like himself?
Should he look into the mirror
and proclaim, as Pogo did,
we have met the enemy
and they is us?

(originally published in Blue Ridge Literary Prose)