Red Black & Blues: A Monster Translation of a Text by Donald Trump

This asemic political poem takes as its source an execrable tweet

goes for its colour scheme to the US electoral map

and lives now as a 45′ long scroll of polypropylene paper, with rolling pins for handles.

Pins to mark a longing for mother-comfort I sense beneath the man’s raging misogyny. I hope now to make an affordable trade edition – an accordion fold, if I can, to keep its (doom)scroll structure in play.

Red Black & Blues uses a distortion technique I had developed making SCRO. My first pass was a play on words, “Iamother,” that came as I was sitting (inside me) with the children our proto-fascist paramilitary border forces were taking from their parents; and the inner severings they’re going to suffer. Wanting to face the one responsible more squarely, I moved on to a tweet of his: a text I could critique, mock, savage, by unravelling it.

This was work I could put my anger & horror into.

Also, compassion I didn’t know of. When I try to summon any for DT consciously I fail. But I found – when I slowed down to a word at a time – I took him at his word.

When he says please, someone in him really means “please.”

When he says “understand,” something in there asks, flailingly, to be understood.

I’m not doing good people on both sides here. I only mean, or at least sense, what’s shit-stained now wasn’t always. He had a face before anyone was born.

The images are made by scribbling real fast on notebook paper

& shivering the page as the scanner scans. I’ve described the method here.

The title is full (too?) of word plays. Red white and blue. Black and blue. Redblack, a cryptography principle. Racial & political shorthand & derogation – Black, Red. And the blues, which do help to true stranger-to-them-me. The final panel fills it in.