Literary Corner: This Is Your President on Drugs

"Frodo Smokes Crack", by Sikojensika/DeviantArt. 

Listening to some BBC expert solemnly explaining that while ultraviolet light and Lysol both can kill coronaviruses on surfaces, President Trump is wrong to suppose that either could be used as injection treatments for Covid-19 patients, and in fact injecting a liquid disinfectant would kill the patient before the virus did. Hey, we knew that, and for all we know Trump does too. They're missing the point.

Like a critic acknowledging that Alph is indeed a sacred river, personified by the Peloponnese river god Alpheus, but Mr. Coleridge errs when he claims that it runs through caverns, measureless or otherwise, and empties into a sunless sea; actually, it empties into the Ionian Sea, where the sky is generally quite bright.

Really, Mr. Coleridge is not doing geography! He's doing something else!

Here's the poem:

Bring the Light Inside the Body

by Donald J.Trump

So supposing we hit
the body with a tremendous—

whether it’s ultraviolet or
just very powerful—light

and I think you said that
hasn’t been checked but
you’re going to test it

and then I said suppose you
brought the light inside the body,
which you can do either through
the skin or in some other way.

And I think you said
you’re going to test that, too

Sounds interesting. Then I see
the disinfectant where it knocks
it out in a minute, one minute.

Is there a way we can do
something like that
by injection inside?

Or almost a cleaning, because
you see it gets in the lungs
and it does a tremendous
number on the lung

So it’d be interesting to
check that. So you’re going to
have to use medical doctors
but it sounds interesting to me,

so we’ll see but the whole
concept of the light

the way it kills it in one
minute, that’s pretty powerful

I mean to say, this is obviously a drug poem, like "Kubla Khan", and specifically a speed freak poem, like Ginsburg's marvelous "Kaddish"—

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

—and more so than the Ginsburg because it's about amphetamine highs, built on one of those obviously false but weirdly compelling speed freak theories (I remember back in the day some very wacked acquaintance explaining at considerable length to the assembled company his strategy for winning every football game, by calling an infinite number of timeouts, and nobody bothering to tell him why this wouldn't work) and explicitly referring to drugs with these electrifying metaphors, an injection of pure, powerful light! an injection that cleanses you in a single minute, a tremendous number on the lung!

As well as about drugs on a Dantesque profusion of levels, since it's also addressing our longing for a drug in the "medical doctor" sense that will cure the Covid-19, which is part of what makes it not just a speed freak effusion but a true poem. The other element is its mysterious unity, through the refrains "you're going to test that" or "check that" addressed to the "medical doctors" who will need to be used, and his own "sounds interesting". And the way at the end the two metaphors, of the light and the disinfectant, reveal themselves as metaphors by melting into one (when it's suddenly the light that kills "in one minute").

I don't believe (as Coleridge and Ginsburg didn't believe, for that matter) in the idea of psychoactive drugs as a kind of prescription for artists, or a fun world where you and your "medical doctor" work out the dosage that gets you the best poems, but I do think that where drugs are part of your life, they're obviously a subject for poetry. In choosing to bare his own drug experience this way, Trump is achieving an astonishing honesty that I didn't think he was capable of.

And with that honesty a freedom I haven't seen before in Trump's work, freedom to say the thing rather than conceal it, which enables him to sustain the incandescent tone and haunted strangeness throughout the piece, without tumbling into the muffed, rhythm-wrecking evasions that disfigure so many of his most promising efforts. This may be be the best thing he's ever written.