Super Bowl LIX + Super Bowl LX + ICE= Y #superbowl #ICE

                  I participated in this year’s Inktober challenge. (For the uninitiated, Intober is a challenge to create an ink drawing inspired by a one-word prompt for each day in October and then post that drawing on social media.) The prompt for day eleven was “Sting”. On October 9^th, Turning Point USA had announced they would be planning an alternative Super Bowl half time show as a response to the late September reveal by the NFL that Bad Bunny is the musical artist booked for the official half time show in 2026. I remembered the complaints of white conservatives about the 2025 Super Bowl half-time headliner Kendrick Lamar, expressing how they “couldn’t even understand him”. Coming on the heels of that and given that Bad Bunny does not typically perform their music in English, I thought to myself about those white conservatives, “Man, that’s gotta sting”, and “pouf!”-- an idea was formed.

                  I was as dumbfounded that many conservatives took this as a left-wing deep state plot as I was that so many people did not know Puerto Rico is an American territory, making Bad Bunny an American. Folks responded to this booking as if it was an affront to white America, seeming to take it quite personally, even as persecution. Do people just not understand, or have they forgotten how capitalism works? Are they not aware that the NFL is a multi-billion-dollar entity that, although it has more money than FIFA, its global viewership is less than that of The World Cup, and that the NFL would like to acquire a some of that international viewership and eventually, a chunk of the FIFA financial pie?

                  As for myself, I will not be watching the Super Bowl. I don’t think I’ve watched a professional football game since Reggie White passed.

                  Anyway, here’s the drawing I’d made. One without the text balloon filled in made the cover of the local “Fall Of Freedom” zine, which is available for purchase at Grit City Books in Tacoma, WA.

One of my poems made it into the above mentioned volume. Here is one that did not.:

Bricks

That’s a nice truck you’re diving. Would sure hate to see it repo’d because

you missed a payment, because you needed the money so you could eat to eat.

We’re walking to work now, putting in all the hours.

To eat. And maybe sleep

in our little hovels,

the ones we are allowed to afford

with the price of gasoline, bread, milk, and eggs,

and straw to make bricks,

all going up and up,

ascending like a feather caught

in a whirlwind of hot air updraft,

swirling in the slick narratives of entitlement,

casually spun

as if there’s no price to pay for abdicated responsibility

or cost for betrayal of allies,

no penalty for unbridled hubris, bigotry,

and the pointing at others yelling, “Adulteress! Slacker!”

while cheating the poor, raping their children, picking their pockets,

and resigning school kids to target practice fodder for anyone’s gun-toting discontent

or blood lust entertainment.

As the Proverb goes regarding such faithless ways, “She eats and wipes her mouth and says,

‘I’ve done nothing wrong’”

Elite preachers and politicians with the thick rings on their manicured fingers and

bedazzled watches on their delicate wrists

whisper into your ear that Jesus came that his followers

might have a life in abundance,

soiling your collar with the filthy breath from their lips,

You and your displaced loyalties reply “thank you” however,

and you keep on walking in your golden sneakers made in China.

About this time, you find a Christmastime lore slipping

from your numbed memory,

the one that says “every time a bell rings, an angel gets their wings”

as it’s being replaced by the notion that at the dull, soul-deadening sound

of the toll of a bell, an eagle’s wing feathers drop like hailstones

on their way to hell, but land in your path along the way instead,

and get kicked up into your pretty shoes

as you’re out here, walking,

refusing to believe that there will be no rising up

without an uprising.

But you keep walking, pale-faced slave to the grift.

Go to your job, clock in those hours to feed you pallor-stricken children

so they can grow to be good soldiers, rising through the ranks,

to achieve enough merit worthy of bloody maiming wounds or death

on the battlefield-

a strip of waterfront property in the Middle East,

their corpse or limbs graced with honored resting place

like clippings of straw

entombed in bricks

made to build a golfing resort state and dynastic tower in Gaza

for the “world people”

You are

too weary to grieve

and too cluelessly blind to the significance of

what the hell this all really means.

Here you are still

out here walking, stooped over now,

stone heart heavy with the weight of denial

and muffled cries from its cauterized flesh begging for surrender

to its weight,

a forward free-fall,

face to the floor repentance,

but you keep stumbling on,

clutching your culture war hate around you

like a cloak of no colors,

knit from recycled grievances, fearmongering talking points,

and dark loyalty pledges to people who don’t give a damn about you

and all your walking,

having abandoned you on the side of this dirt road

without a thought,

hoping it may never occur to you

that their hate may be impenetrable for now,

but love, should you choose it

is invincible.

Copyright 2025 Sandra K King

All the best to you all!