The moment the Mueller Report was released,
its words appeared in fifty-foot letters of floating quicksilver,
embossed on the surface of the Great Lakes.
There were cries of delight, wails of grief,
and guffaws of laughter so loud the earth shook.
Long-smoldering volcanoes were nudged alive and spat bolders, fire and smoke.
Cars flew off the roads and into the air, whirled, hovered, and crashed to earth.
People planned unreasonable journeys,
began impossible tasks they could not finish,
tried desperately to explain to one another…exactly what, they did not know.
Sixteen pigeons, perched on billiard balls, nodded sagely.
That night a shooting star split the sky,
shattered into a thousand pieces of rainbow-colored glass
and rained over North America as gems,
which turned to blood the moment you picked them up.
But the desperate, the despised and the discarded turned their backs on this grand proscenium,
crossed their arms over their chests, set their chins,
and rose in a towering dark cloud that spread over the land and poured heavy rain for a week.
All vestiges of the words on the Lakes were dispersed by the torrent and sank to the beds.
Floods nearly drowned the land.
More, on every hardcopy the words of the Report bled into illegibility,
every digital file of the Report was hopelessly corrupted,
every photographic memory of the Report was wiped clean.
This became known as The Great Redaction.
Everywhere was a great wringing of hands.
And with the vanishing of the report,
all whose lives were now bereft of meaning wandered over the highways, bewildered;
or else retreated to the corners of rooms, hugged their knees,
rocked slowly, rhythmically, and moaned softly.
Amid this devastation, the great cloud broke apart and its human forms returned to earth.
On earth they remained the desperate, the despised and the discarded.
The sun shone and the land began to dry.
And things were as they had been, only worse.