ode to emancipated rubble

of thee i sing (and sigh),

commencing with
the pallid press
enabling the cabling
of stability's stable, 
blazing the stale,
self-hailing trail
of a flailing,
failing state;

scaling unexplored,
uninformed depths
of unbridled,
unconscionable denial;

aligning the
reassigned citizenry
of competitive paupers,
dutifully consuming
an incorporated stand
of rebranded homeland;

enforcing the "interests"
of the conscienceless hoarders,
sowing scarred sores
on pored over scores
of presumptive,
misappropriated borders.

i sing to an
intangible,
fabled piece
of our mother's
ineffable skin

where need-seeded,
greed-kneaded,
creed-weeded tenants
have been brainwashed
for staggered generations
to imagine
they're the ones
the demented beacon
shines on;

where pigmented "others"
are routinely deported,
disenfranchised,
or "lawfully" disposed of
(along with all those
broken headlights,
thus eluding any
untoward illumination,
shattering the slanted
vision of justice).

i sigh for the sting 
of freedom's unfounded ring

saddled by the
strangely embedded,
addling media
and the death-rattling prattle
of lavishly reimbursed
paddle-less politicians;

ceaselessly stalked
by that lucre-soaked
stroke of stoking genius
that swallowed We the People
in a Hollywood laundered,
good-guy-bad-guy,
two-dimensional mentality;

that dauntless paucity
uncentering dissention,
proscribing the limits
of unencumbered thought
as surely as a
pair of horns
silences rebellion
in an angry god's
unquestioned dominion;

the bipolar duopoly
of hypo-mock'ocracy,
siphoning revolution
into quadrennial extravaganzas
where hundreds of millions
of opinions, persons,
and undisclosed dollars
are squeezed in the
freely attested
modern-day miracle
of the passive ascension
of two glossy notches

sighted by the faithful
on the pre-approved menus
of the right and righter flanks
of stone-bleeding amnesiacs
and brokered, broken asses.

i sigh for the promise
that might have discovered
America

where the Commons was doomed
by handing its airwaves
to the plundering pirates,
impaled on profit's rails,
and pegged to the
pilloried posts
of a privileged
and propertied propaganda;

where garlanded fences
tell war criminals' tales,
ubiquitously embellished
in the prideful swells
of welling myth,
plastered like trophies
on the filmed coffin lids
of a myopic synopsis,
glazing over gapes
in its gasping lapses of history.

i sing to awaken
a lingering,
unrealized dream

doomed by its epic failure
to recognise itself,
rooted in a racist displacing
of the sacred sense
of shared humanity,
masking a cloaked insecurity
and all those forgotten,
severed connections
that stem from incessant,
unrepentant intervention
proceeding from the donning
of the binding and blinding
invention of whiteness;

condemned by its betters,
and their trickle-up theory
of selfish and soulless
one-upmanship
to blithely,
heedlessly,
relentlessly manifest
the exceptionally ingested destiny
of projected,
misdirected
protection.


or put another way...


ashes to ashes;
depleted uranium
is rusting the dust;

while bleached, talking models
instill their daily dribble,
piping the prescribed
contrived serenade,
paraded for patriots
following a bouncing bubble

independence is crushed
in the serial,
heartbroken litany
of defenseless, other-coloured,
unprofiting nations
that are buried in terror's
emancipated rubble.

like some hellish plague
of brutal high-tech locusts

the rogue "superpower",
in the vaunted strides
and suicidal tides
of its isolating state

will "protect itself"
until it finally turns out

there's no unflattened,
unimpounded earth

left in the hounded mounds
of scattered rubble

to trouble its
protracted
televised dearth
at all.

** ***** ** **** ** **** ** ***** **

- Evan Hawthorn, the 24^th of July, 2017

wishes

i wonder why wishes aren't granted in Gaza
where sorrow never sleeps and freedom can't awake.

since they haven't found a way to hem in the heavens
could it be that the stars show up by mistake?

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

refrain in a planed vein

'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 30^th of June, 2017

a Pondering on Ponderous Pilgrims * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (a Preposterous Celestial Lament)

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 17^th of June, 2017

our mother's other children * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (a canticle in search of compassion)

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 4^th of June, 2017

ode to an unbearable air

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 25^th of May, 2017