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 5th of July, 2017
'is the pain retained,
as it's plainly ingrained
in our plaintive, waning strains?
does it plumb the depths
to encumber their lumber?
splinter their cinders
or hinder their tinder?
does it trouble the murdered
listless flowers
in their glassy,
stilted repose?
and must i explain
though lifeblood has drained,
lying here helplessly,
achingly missing the rain
what it felt like
to be embraced by
sun-dappled birds,
and the hope spun in nests,
and the confidences laid up
in scurrying
surreptitious scratches?
faint echoes shimmer
in the weave of grieving leaves,
rustling empathy
for their stories.
like the call of
phantom branches
i never stop feeling,
keening from that
unabated hunger
to give them shelter
from which they'll
forever abstain.
in quiet mornings
i think i hear
their trilling songs
and something inside me
seems to shudder.
who decreed these
inconceivable,
irretrievable gifts
should be squandered
by those who
can't even see them?
and what of weathered seasons,
and the constant,
ineffable yearning
in that
oh, so infinite reach?
has it all been in vain?'
"that's what i hear,"
she said
as her fingers lingered
on the unexplored,
heartbroken surface
of vetted and fretted,
life-indebted wood.
* **** * *** * **** * *** * **** *
- Evan Hawthorn, the 30th of June, 2017
conflicted by his
orbiting affections,
tending towards shyness
rather more than he ought
whenever he's pulled
into Earth's opposition
our second cousin Saturn
is inclined to be distraught.
the arc of revolution
sends him into a spin,
where ringing with conjecture
he's crossly overwrought.
thus frazzled and bright,
he stays up half the night
but finds himself unable
to resolve a single thought.
* **** * *** * **** * *** * **** *
- Evan Hawthorn, the 17th of June, 2017
beyond the scripted,
convoluted ken
of the zombie army of corporate operatives;
outside the profit-ridden
failure of imagination,
with its sanguinary conceit
of imaginary borders;
past the putrid, narrow confines
cast by racistly conscripted,
patriotic glasses
our broken hearts connect
with frail human hands
so easy to recognise
(even in their hundreds of "inessential" millions)
by their humble aspirations
and fears for their children;
by their unexpressed longing,
unsuspected courage,
and soul-wrenching grief;
by their faults and their spurnings,
and their weary,
thankless trudgings;
in the stunning resilience
that radiates its question
in the stony, deadened face
of a centuries-old,
disparaging dis-empowerment;
in the fleeting, bracing glimpses
that grace those daring eyes
with an angelic vision
of their ebullient best;
in the secret, private callings
that breathe a billion beckons
from the numberless weave
of empowering paths;
in that spin of the ineffable,
incomprehensible kaleidoscope,
shimmering its facets
wrought entirely from dreams
and precious,
unique gifts.
these are the hands
of our mother's other children.
these are the strands
of our grandchildren's hopes.
they would bring us past the breach,
within compassion's
sweetest reach,
where our brothers
and our sisters
genuflect their careworn mirrors
that bathe our ancient yearnings
in the earth's resplendent peace;
where each of them harbours
a splendid, tingling piece
of our
ever so lonely,
oh, so human
selves.
* * * * * *
- Evan Hawthorn, the 4th of June, 2017
if the irony weren't
dripping from a bloodbath,
one could almost laugh
at the Times and the Post,
and the rest of the right flanks
in the establishment's stables,
lined up like so many
conscience-less zombies,
their collective karma
in an overwhelmed coma,
more dead than their millions
of abetted brown corpses,
their 'free speech' banners
as hollow as Trump Tweets,
the burden of their collusion
haunting the fetid breezes
where Democracy might
have actually rung.
**** * * **** * * ****
- Evan Hawthorn, the 25th of May, 2017
when compared to the astonishingly consistent,
hundred percent subservience
to the Machiavellian wishes of Israel and Saudi Arabia,
evinced in the election-resistant
slightness of light
between the establishment's firmament
of right and righter parties
(notwithstanding those bulging curtains
and shuffling sandals that loom in the 9-11 mists),
Russia's unprecedented,
heinous and nefarious, Godzilla-rearing influence
must be a preternatural thing indeed.
going only by the sold out crowds
for the resurrected re-ascendance
of nationalism and patriotism,
by the strange sightings of McCarthy's ghost,
lurking with his war profiteer bedfellows
at the head of the goose-stepping ranks
of the Party that isn't Democratic,
joined at the hip as they suddenly are
to "Democracy's friends" at the CIA,
spontaneously sprouting from neoliberal pods
as a redefined species
of born again regime changers,
speaking in their suspicious,
fifties tongues,
just loud enough to be heard
by the listening devices
their souped up cell phones
so willingly surrendered
to one of their folksy own,
sounding on their righteous trumpets
a clarion call for the
infotainment freedom of regurgitated speech,
while sharpening pikes for the heads of Wikileaks
and shading the right sides of elephants' hides,
brandishing their subscriptions
to the woefully persecuted
John the Baptist scribes and channellers,
those Prepare-Ye-the-Way-of-War serial criminals
at the Times and the Post,
this inconclusive, and stubbornly
elusive influence,
thinly veiled and eagerly,
unanimously assailed,
would have to be a sort of
hitherto unimagined dark matter,
a reverse-acting, negative-exposing,
history-and-reality-reinventing,
circumspection-circumventing,
menacingly-clever-yet-obtusely-clueless,
conveniently-refocusing,
repackaging and recriminating,
self-inflicting-with-demonization
type of 'influence',
equipped with a malice
uncannily similar to our manifestly predestined,
projected intentions.
those very same, never questioned,
mythic intentions
we're forever hearing all those accolades about,
that are in fact the stock and trade
of every American politician,
and form a kind of religion
in and of themselves,
prompting us
(and oddly, no one else but us)
to surround other people's countries,
especially the independent ones,
with eight hundred state of the art
military bases.
those very same, ever so profitable intentions
that naturally allow us to excuse ourselves
whenever we happen to murder
a noticeable number of "other" people,
which happens whenever an angel rings a bell
and the stocks go up.
the sputtering, Democracy-splattering intentions
that gushed from a string
of proudly appraising presidents
who eyed Cuba as the "jewel" in their "necklace",
glinting with promised riches
in their gated and whitewashed
Latin American "backyard".
the beacon-beaming, exemplary intentions
that the peasants and pack animals
in Southeast Asia
are still reeling from,
and so many refugees are trying to escape.
the "good" intentions that are buried
with the "bad" Indians' freedom.
unfailingly masked by the
pornographic fiction of colluding Hollywood,
and the dependable deflection
of our directionly disabled, looking glass media.
and yet
as if to prove our legendary lawlessness
and our stunning dearth
of sentient, functioning journalists,
they are brazenly flaunted
in the bedazzling light of 'America's day'
in Bill Clinton's celebrated
declaration of piracy
and the Sainted Obama's smooth assertion
that "full spectrum dominance"
is the "overriding goal"
of our "exceptionally indispensable"
foreign policy.
meanwhile,
i expect the uniformly reputed rarefied niche
of Simon Bar Sinister's
retroactively ricocheting, reasonless influence
will one day be explained.
it's the sort of thing one might hope to find
in the special features of a Doctor Who DVD.
perhaps in that lost episode
where he stumbles over
the invisible weapons of mass destruction
and ends up accidentally
spreading Democracy™.
** **** * **** *** **** * **** **
- Evan Hawthorn, the 22nd of May, 2017
the relief that our left bank colonial flank
is safe in the reassuring arms
of "Centrist Neoliberalism"
echoes like the quaking knell
still hemorrhaging
for our substance-less "Democracy".
it washes up in trending waves,
raising the death-rattle spectre
of Jacob Marley's chains,
resounding with the reflectionless ring
of emotional appeals,
like the congregational tide of shocked indignation
which is itself,
in its with-us-or-against-us
relentless resistance
(to undoctored history),
and blithe indifference
to the dauntless dearth of choice,
the very essence
of the unnoticed absence.
this haunting is made complete
with the myopic visitation
of Fascist unwanted posters
summoned by the unholy communion
of donkeys, profiteers, assassins and spies,
unfurling from virtual woodwork
in a focus-stroking shell game,
much like the "Democrats" themselves,
or journalism's jugglers,
hooked with green IVs
to the Powers that Own.
for they dish out many isms,
and before enamoured eyes
installed the creaking floorboards
beneath the bulging, bloated clown,
that deftly played distraction
who could hardly accomplish,
left to his own narcissistic devices
this decades-long descent,
let alone the perfectly executed
Ayn Rand Strangelove's
homeopathic cabinet
of all-consuming decapitation.
the Bully in Chief,
that one-man travelling brand,
the bleached whale poster child
of Wee Willy Syndrome,
is opportunity's opportunist,
incapable of creating anything,
leering from lurid curtains
when times and rubes ripen.
the biggest baddest wolf
at the Protection Racket's revolving door.
the demon head on the flipping, counterfeit coin,
bedazzling the preening flock
of endangered, lopsided, ill-informed eagles,
pinioned by their surplus
of righteous right wings.
like the slickly conflicted corporate menus
the demented beacon's atrophied citizens
and reassigned consumers are saddled with,
the French electoral circus
doesn't furnish off ramps
from the lockstep, bipartisan,
rapaciously exceptional,
paved with rampant "interests"
and "inessential" corpses,
24-7, highway to hell.
**** * * **** * * ****
- Evan Hawthorn, the 11th of May, 2017
