The Dream Children of Addison Mitchell McConnell III

By Michael Henson

What are the dreams
That await the sleep of Mitch McConnell?
Do children enter with their hungers?
Do they sit at the side of the road of dream
with their empty bowls
and their wide curious eyes?
I believe they wait each day in their hidden places
along the congressional corridors,
hidden in the pedestals of the heroic torsos
or in the pages of the latest allocation.
They listen closely
as he takes counsel
with donors, with lobbyists,
and with the men who line their pockets
with congressional silver.
And when at last he reaches the end of his workday,
and his heels click along the marble floors,
the dream children follow him home
to the commodious house where he takes his rest.
They watch and they wait until,
after all the calls to more donors, more lobbyists,
he lays his wearied head, at last,
onto his expensive pillow.
There, they gather each night.
I fear they might stumble
into his commodious jowls
and be smothered under his multiple chins.
But they are adept.
They enter, like miners,
through the drift mouth of his ears
or down the haunted portals of his nostrils.
And there they begin to explore.
Their tiny encandled skulls
flicker in the catacombic corridors
and all along the calcified neurons of his cerebellum.
They tiptoe carefully to avoid
the pockets of methane and legislative obstruction
as they explore each lobe, from stem to cerebellum:
Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital,
through the fraught closets of the hypothalamus,
careful not to stumble
into the stagnant, trauma-riddled pools of his amygdala,
wherein lie the fraught tangles of its medial, basolateral
and fearfully anterior subnuclei
and into the committee rooms of the medulla oblongata.
There they observe the nodes of prevarication and avarice,
the glands of duplicity, the ganglia of manipulation
and those synapses
in which are sparked the neural signals
for insult and vituperation.
They continue in their nightlong forensic investigations,
to search, hopelessly,
amid the odor of carbide and conspiracy,
for any hint,
any flickering shard
of the dismal wreckage of a soul.


Michael Henson is author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His most recent is the satirical novella, The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell by Donald J. Trump as recounted to The Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic into Modern English by Michael Henson. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and sings lead for the Carter Bridge, a Cincinnati-based bluegrass band.

Photo credit: Douglas Graham via the U.S. Library of Congress


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