because of the convincing lies
told by this one man
to a held at bay
plundered world turned "global battlefield"
hundreds of thousands
of myriad gifted receivings of beings
are lost to the berefted ken stilled in the living,
disrupted families in uncountable millions
have been thrust from their unfathomed
unAmerican homes
into reliefless lives of unimaginable misery
(save for those silent driftings
asundered under
the lurid Mediterranean),
there are craters where there used to be towns,
and we have all the evidence
we can possibly ignore
that it's even more
harmful to future generations
to punish the intransigent independence
of a brimming with intrepid heroes
bombarded city like Fallujah
with massive quantities of white phosphorus
than were all the deformities
our pilgrims' progress of split nuclei
wreaked upon the innocent
bystanders in Japan.
and here's this vicious visage,
yet another coasted toasting
of an unwanted poster unindicted,
suited up in authoritied sorority
passing around partisan handouts
for the going rage of saged advice,
warning of the perils of "deranged people"
feeling "empowered"
by
avalanched lies.
would these dropped pearls
had sown a heeded crop
before Martin Luther King
had occasion
to courageously observe,
(sealing his own assassination)
that America,
(already then)
was the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world.
yet no one would dream
of arresting
a latter day Pinocchio
witness for the offense
like tightly screwed
upright thinking
weapon pimping
statesman Colin Powell,
because none of those victims,
as it turns out,
actually mattered to Americans,
who see themselves as good people.
(to say nothing of the
"news" carriers, themselves
who go on unaccountably
vending their wares
in the patriot baited
mindlessly regurgitated
drumming of saturation
guise of currented facts.)
far from it, he's held up in the hold up
as a benevolent example
in comparison,
say,
with the obvious evil
of the obsessively observed
strutted abutting unsubtlety
of
a rapaciously grasping
tweet bleating
bump
in
the lumpen night.
which prompts the irreverent question,
if Jack the Ripper
had gone ahead and said
"love thy neighbour as thyself",
ought we be willing
to see him matted,
gleaming rapier glossed,
plastered on our
socially
distanced media,
so we can all
nod if we agree
to
irony's apogee
with those religiously
prodigious
Toontown'o'morphic icons
standing in for our
attenuated
unoffending
notion of emotions
in the newly normal
untouchable milieu?
the answer, of course,
is already written
in functioning
journalism's
disregarded shards.
as long as it can be used
to belittle the Frankenstein
of incorporated reality's
always on tap,
teed up and peed down
grand distraction
tractioning fealty
to racist placist realty
in a rift sifting gift
that keeps on giving;
the only evildoer
seen in every scene
preening in the sheen
of the rampart's bred glare
squinted by the empire's
partisan dueling
schoolings of unquestioning
tailoring and laundering
taken in
in the CIA embedded,
militantly wedded,
lavishly funded
morally shredded,
culpability redacted
inhumanity abetted,
"free press" tufted
liberally shafted,
photo opp'ed,
tunnel app'ed
and funhouse tilted,
twenty-four-
and-seven scored
screenings of apparency
all for the interest
accruing benefit
of infotaining
the profit splaining
to the seamed and teaming
manicured and weeded,
polarised receptors
composed in interposed
progressively conformist
divisively spliced
faith based followings
of divine freedom's
entwined fixed agendas
less is more or less
blessed or digressed,
needs must digest
tuned in as "the news".
'tis compartmentalisation
that
diagnoses
this
hypnosis,
with an unhealthy dose
of prevailing assailing's
other perennial
all too human plague,
garden variety projection,
which allows it to be
presented in its
blithely abided way
skating amidst
the memory hole doused
self-focus blissed
status quo mist
of the greatest pillage
of this or any age,
admiring its piracy
and donning its rage,
in the always profitable
century in perfecting
somnolence injecting
presumption unabated
in genocide plated
boxes
of
tide
pridefully dyed,
consumptively styed,
in the slight
of plighted sight's
sleekly reeking
prospect
on the righted
slide
of
history
with arrogance allied;
the righting of might
in that starless midnight;
the tillaging of privilege;
the blinding of the blindered;
the mining of the mindered.
it's how we arrived
at the atrophy ringed
cloaked and daggered
scarred duggery
circus of the stars
exclusively intrusive
mockery
of
democracy
in which elections
are redundantly staged
with nary a resort
to meaningful choice;
(for the shadow
of a hinted suggestion
that alternatives exist
is in nefarious cahoots
with Simon bar Sinister's
foreigner duped
unspeakably evil
dissent simmering
potion of reflection,
outlawed out of hand
like independence itself,
and rumoured to be on the lam
somewhere in the demonised
dictatorial narrative sweep
of that backyard canard
where unbridled groping's
doped gringos
roped the peasants
of the rest of America)
and hence,
in the brave rampant staves
tensing all those fences
round other peoples'
appropriated sand,
in manned up standing
bandings
of a promissory land
wherein freedom is said to loom,
there's been no practical way
to vote against mass murder
since 1972.
a whole lifetime for some.
a precarious dearth
of havened berth
going on three
hounded generations
for a huge swathe
of unpeopled victims
(which is to say
our unrecognised relations
awaiting an American discovery
of that treasonous territory,
the terrorism christened,
Christ envisioned,
unbordered
and
disorderly
port of humanitied connection.)
it bogles the imagination
to conceive
what the world might be like now
if the red and blue shepherded flocks
of that purple bruise infusing
sole presiding Super Power bully
had along about then
come
to
value
honesty and equality,
and,
stretching the warped rafters
of unthinkable probability
almost beyond endurance,
the independence of others
with the same relentless
preoccupation
given over
to the trillion dollar,
bipartisan invested,
benevolence finessed
"full spectrum dominance"
Saint Obama declared
from the mountaintop
"the overriding purpose
of America's foreign policy"
or say,
just the smidgen less
wishful persistency
afforded that
good old fashioned civility
someone's always on about.
there'd actually be
a completely unprecedented
American president
along about now
who,
presiding in some
dream world
yet to be unfurled
where the beacon
of stolen homelands
is a law abiding
unhooded nation
that follows its own
instituted
Nuremberg laws,
wouldn't
have
to
be
summarily
hanged.
*
- Evan Hawthorn
the second day of a new year
that looks very much like the old beholden one
