longer.blue

~ Reduce eighty-six About three hundred percent  Forty-seven gone ~ This deceptively compact haiku reframes itself entirely once the opening line is understood correctly. "Reduce eighty-six" is not an invocation of the slang term meaning to eliminate a person — it is, in fact, a direct repudiation of that rhetoric. The poem's first gesture is corrective: to reduce, to diminish, to drain the power from the dangerous and irresponsible language that conflates "eighty-six" with assassination. In this reading, the poem becomes an act of responsible political speech, pushing back against the inflammatory discourse that has increasingly blurred the line between hyperbole and genuine threat. The significance of choosing the haiku form here cannot be overstated. Haiku is a tradition of distillation — of saying only what is essential and trusting the reader to feel the weight of what is left out. By packaging this political corrective inside such a restrained form, the poet mirrors the very argument being made: that language should be reduced, clarified, and stripped of its most dangerous excesses. The form is the message. The second line, "About three hundred percent," continues the critique of rhetorical excess by targeting Trump's well-documented misuse of statistical language surrounding drug price reductions. Trump repeatedly promised reductions of implausible, mathematically incoherent magnitude — enormous percentage figures deployed not as policy but as performance. The word "about" is savagely precise in its imprecision, capturing exactly how such numbers are used: confidently, loosely, and without accountability. The poem indicts this culture of numerical exaggeration that masquerades as bold leadership. The final line, "Forty-seven gone," lands as the poem's quiet resolution. With Trump as the 47th President, "gone" expresses a longing for the departure of this entire rhetorical era — the threats, the inflated promises, the dangerous political language that has normalized the unacceptable. The poem ultimately argues that words carry consequences, and that reducing harmful rhetoric is not censorship but survival.