No magnet school, suspension bridge,
No access road or mountain ridge,
No birthing ward or nursing home,
No hockey rink or velodrome,
No City Hall–abutting diner,
Ferryboat, or ocean liner
Shall bear the name or likeness, no,
Of Mayor Bill de Blasio.
There won’t be any hue and cry
Of “God, we must salute this guy!
Yes, how can we constituents
Exalt this slab of indolence?
Let’s build a great big bust of him
Slow-pedaling in his Park Slope gym
Or making grieving people wait
To lay a wreath, because he’s late!”
This oafish man has pulled it off—
He’s made eight million people scoff
At his profound ineptitude:
The beefy cop, the hipster dude,
The basic girls with straightened hair,
The crusties down in Tompkins Square,
Team Occupy, Team Wall Street Bro—
Ain’t no one pro–de Blasio.
So many of us took the bait
When he said he’d alleviate
The gaping inequality
Of Bloomberg-era N.Y.C.
We voted this big lummox in
Because he wasn’t Christine Quinn.
And also, if we’re being fair,
We liked his wife, and Dante’s hair.
And lo, it somehow came to pass
That some white man from Cambridge, Mass.,
Named Warren Wilhelm at his birth
Bestrode the greatest place on earth.
But barely had he served a week
When Mayor Bill—What gall! What cheek!—
Became the self-anointed king
Of this whole land’s progressive wing.
And on this stage he proved to be
More A-S-S than A.O.C.
He played to crickets in Des Moines,
His oratory soul-destroyin’.
And we back home said, “Bill, c’mon!
What record are ya running on,
Ya dorm-room Sandinista dork
Who eats his pizza with a fork.”
This groundhog-killing narcissist
Has left all factions feeling pissed:
The protesters who got mowed down,
The disenfranchised Black and brown,
Those cops he groveled to appease
Who weaponized their S.U.V.’s.
A real New Yorker knows the truth:
These guys, they are placation-proof.
No thin-skinned P.D. union chief
Is worth the tsuris or the grief.
Pat Lynch? Ed Mullins? Good luck, pal—
Ain’t no uplifting their morale.
You kiss their keisters, sing their praise,
And look right past their Trumpy ways.
But still they’ll turn their backs to you
Because “You disrespect da blue!”
And wouldn’t it have been a balm
To have a mayor with aplomb
To counter Trump when he went off
With vigor, and not logy sloth?
Wouldn’t it have done the trick
To have an empath, not a prick,
To lend us sympathetic ears
O’er these last four exhausting years?
De Blahs will barely leave a mark.
He’ll never get a public park
Or sandwich named “in homage to”
Unless it’s made with tempeh—eiuww!
No rest stop on I-87
Or tribute show on PIX-11
Shall future generations see
And contemplate his legacy.
Admittedly, the bar is low
For following de Blasio.
A subway rat could be sworn in
And still be better than he’s been.
But let us hope, in ’22,
We’ll welcome in a person who
Revives this city we adore
That Ol’ Wilhelm will helm no more.
David Kamp is a New York–based writer and the author of Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America
