what falls downwind from democracy's dearth * * * * * * * * * (a ghost story ripped from cold dead hands)

chained to their
racially spiked,
genocidal contradictions,
hoarding up hosts
of privileged convictions
like white on rice,

the Hollywood-honed,
media-mandated,
profitably pruned
and status-latticed,
enfeebling fables
of freeing consumption

and the insatiable war-machine's
sacredly unquestioned,
morality-hollowing,
projection-wallowing,
Commons-swallowing,

tolerance-misplacing,
democracy-debasing,
memory-erasing,
threat-displacing,
conscience-encasing,

independence-smashing,
diplomacy-bashing,
Constitution-slashing,
human rights-trashing,
blood money-stashing,

spitting out misery
in relentless rehashing,
immune to election "protection" racket

have led strapped and gapless,
hapless generations
of historically blighted,
blindered and benighted,

divvied into pockets
the sidling duopoly
divisively provided,

pandered with "exception"
and distractioned to inaction,
"homeland" rebranding "Americans"

to confuse the apparency
of looking-glass freedom

with the brazenly illegal,
profoundly unsound,
serial
psychotic tradition

of the Empire's uncountable
unaccountable bombs

streaming through freedom's
misappropriated skies

depleting uranium
with a patriot's flare,

exterminating families
with nary a care,

bursting downwind
in its garish red glare

to empty of all meaning
the democratic air.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 5^th of July, 2017