Sinister Syntax (the):

a drifted tense,
easy to miss in an
Orwellian empire drowning in irony,
only grasped when one
corrects
their objective perspective.

example: the war on terror IS the terror.

provocatively present,
in its deflected sense,
in the evasive intent
lurking in all the "wars"
the zombie army of corporate operatives
launch with their
Alice's looking glass,
media projected,
inverse-inflected
slight of hand.

(i.e. the wars "on" drugs & crime & poverty
& tyranny & the absence of freedom.)

the subject is always
the concealed causative clause,
as surely as the sun sets
on our "starless midnight of racism and war."*

for war,
by definition,
is the crime in any sentence,

invariably inflicting
its cancerous damage
on its hapless eternal object,

humanity itself.

* the starless midnight of racism and war" was first uttered by Martin Luther King, in his
speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, back before it, too, was reverse engineered.