unleashed in a raging flood
of tidal outpourings,
unmoored manipulations,
and outbursting posts
another go round
of gated, baited weeping
and exacerbating angst.
here's a woman
screaming into the cameras
greedily glued
to this latest
volunteer windfall.
for two fell birds
thus plop amoungst
the baggage-growing bush
from a bleeding, rolling stone,
skating the ratings
with yet another
auto-replicating sound byte
of random distraction.
every shrill syllable
a staccato blast
of emotional shrapnel,
plowing over the
firmly rooted,
resolutely rebooted
absence of reason,
preempting even
the rattled addling chains
that saddle McCarthy's ghost
to the lesser evil faithful,
that johnny come lately bande
of borne again brethren
strangely embedded
with America's preeminent
assassins, liars, and spies,
the sworn eternal enemies
of Black Panthers,
peace,
We the People,
and Martin Luther King.
"keep the guns
out of our children's hands!"
tolling bellows unbottled
desperately bleat,
swinging from a bitter end
of atrophied rope.
"install metal detectors in every classroom!"
naturally i look around
for the pitchfork and sheet.
and i think,
how typically American
to fanatically fix
that narrowed, harrowed pinch
of scant, slanted focus
on trimming the monsters' claws.
it was then that i heard
the curious clicking echoes
of Facebook flipping
its proliferating
privileged profiles,
flapping in the
rancid breeze,
wafted from an
already forgotten autumn;
redolent of fraternal
flag-poling frogs,
yet no longer
packaged with fries;
a déjà vu of esprit de corps
from that veiled pale bromance
with the likely likes
of Africa-choking,
misery-stoking
colonial cohorts in France.
and once again
i'm impelled to point out
that the inevitable, impregnable
failure of Americans
to recognise their relations
wears out the tatters
of my fondness for them.
for suddenly, once again
they've decided en masse
(as if they'd felt this way all along)
that they find child murder
intolerably abhorrent.
too bad it's too late
for those abruptly interrupted
wakening Yemeni minds
buried in collapsed schoolrooms
where no child gets left behind;
wasted into wraiths
backed into the arms
of rampant disease
by the viciously ambitious
Coalition of the Winning;
ducking from the Profit's bombs
oil-laden, intransigent sheikhs
hurl from air show trophies
the 'world's policemen'
refuel in midair
so they needn't waste any
of Death's dismounting time.
too bad its too late
for the hundreds of thousands
of Libyan angels
begging the pieces
of their phantom parents
to make the noises stop.
too bad its too late
for the half a million
Iraqi toddlers
slowly starved to death,
a return investment
on Madeline Albright's
feminist laced
responsibility braced
bargain basement
price worthy dearth.
too bad its too late
to start a new mythology
by sewing back together
all that multitude of fragments;
daisy-cuttered,
mine-devined,
cluster-crusted
basted bits of roasted flesh
whose forgotten names
and 'inessential' dreams
still torment the anxious wind.
*
like the used,
abused, and defused
useless resistance
hooting at the buffoon of Oz,
(that bleached whale poster child
for Wealthoholics Anonymous
and Wee Willy Syndrome,
spitting out his double dares
and gutless, witless
pitilessicms,
splitting the pithy, steamy seams
of m(isl)edia coffers,
whilst drawing that rapt
bereft attention
away from the oligarchs' curtains)
they're manning the battlements
that binary blinders
always throw up
whenever it's possible
to ponder an actual cause.
were it my children
America's number one
economic entitlement
had to be 'kept from',
those fiendish devices
the right side of history's
technology devises,
hell's fresh advances
Congress
lavishly represents
and precedent presidents
are so obsessed with funding,
i'd find myself wondering
from whence my
inhuman offsprings'
psychotic cravings come.
but the answer is everywhere around us.
it's practically the raison d'être
for America itself.
for its cinema and laws
its the probable cause.
the mandible principle
that operates its jaws.
subliminal and otherwise
it never suffers pause,
this cultural mandate
that outs itself in flaws.
it feeds every frame
in video games
with a mesmerizing voltage
that breeds macho screeds
from awkward adolescence
and its self conscious seeds.
it's lapped up in comic books,
wrapped up in hormones
in the soft porny glory
of garish super heroes.
immortalized on every screen,
rationalized by talking heads,
their calculations so obscene
divvying the earth into six foot beds.
hammered into
protection racket plaster
to solder the platforms
of red and blue leeches.
imbibed by folksy firesides
with the pandering of speeches.
lined with good intentions
obligingly oblique,
the rituals at football games
sublimate its reek.
idolized by Hollywood
for bringing in the meek.
dazed into oblivion
with every bleeding week.
its gateway drug,
the surrender to hate
the Bible would
have us call "Justice",
and the one two punch,
drowning the imagination
of every spirited child
ground into dust
before it has the chance
to spread fitful wings;
the greatest of evil's justifications,
that enabling enfabling
that underlies it all,
the founding, impounding myth
of 'good guys' and 'bad guys';
(those whose motivation
can never be questioned,
and those they kill
without recourse
to consciousness
or apparent consequence);
for the real objection
to lone wolf psychopaths
has always been
the flaunting of authoritied priorities
when the prodigally deranged
appropriate for themselves
the right to decide
just who the bad guys are.
*
inhaled since birth,
coming from every direction
like cancerous airborne
DNA,
in preconflicted
unevictable layers
built on previous
interlocking distortions,
suffocating instinct
and contravening conscience
till all that's left
celebrates and inculcates
the exceptional American message
that mass murder is the
sacred and inviolate
one size fits all
solution to every problem.
from 'commander and chief'
of the 'armed' 'forces'
through the minority culling
and citizen quelling police
right down to "make my day"
and the brawling angry mob
round a runaway puck
it's at the very center of all things American,
like disposable people and plastic.
*
all those photo ops
and campaign stops,
dripping emotion
from unsoppable mops,
in the choreographed
rhetorical dance
of gun control's
annual
failure to advance.
but nary a
regurgitating
long suffering acolyte
is willing to consider
that the fractiously seasoned
statistically reasoned
studied paucity of rational laws
is not the only difference
between the blithe occupants
of "the greatest purveyor of terror
the world has ever known" (MLK),
and the children of
a lessor (less violent) god
who've managed to survive
America thus far.
most of them, of course,
are unpeople,
who simply don't count,
made official policy
when the military beast
stopped counting its victims
back in the sainted Obama's day.
(unwitnessed, of course
by the faithful's
dutifully averted eyes.)
made exponentially impossible
when our daredevil heroes,
running out of
targets to flatten
tumbled North Korea's dams,
erasing entire villages.
(yet our amnesiac telemodels
would have us believe
distrust of American intentions
makes one insane.)
made surreal
by mourning 58 thousand
marauding freedom crusaders
and democracy spreaders
who silenced forever
three million Southeast Asians,
(and almost all of their pack animals)
protecting "our democracy"
from "their internal aggression"
for having the audaciousness
(so frequently encountered
in bad guys)
that allowed them to believe
they had a right
to govern their own affairs.
but any student
of Cecil B. Demille
will tell you
spectacles of patriot pageantry
to venerate the fancies
of epic hypocrisy
always need extras.
fodder for the
ruggedly free
super sized and powered,
blessed no less
by their fearsome,
whitewashed god,
cash register ringing
from first sight
to seized sea,
bullish and brutish experiment
in self-focused,
self-righteous tyranny.
which brings us to the
hemorrhaging elephant
eclipsing the
blood-spattered room.
two centuries' blowback
from exported terror
and internal genocide
coming home to roost;
the karmic self-fulfillment
of manifesting
vested destiny,
rebounding on itself with its
characteristic vengeance.
*
you simply can't vanish
from the sinking lifeboat
you've claimed as your eternal,
borderless battlefield
somewhere in the vicinity
of thirty million living things
in just seventy five years
(and who knows how many before that)
and not expect some of your
hapless children
to up and kill themselves
perhaps in a hopeless dawning
of disillusioned shock,
or maybe from a
convoluted attempt
to mitigate their elders'
irredeemable
unapproachable shame,
or then again it might be
a form of far sighted
selflessness
subconsciously resolved
amoungst the better,
conscious-stricken part
of that willfully blinded stock
to thin the reflectionless herds
in the superpower's bowers
of groomed and preexhumed
future assassins
when they finally come to grasp
the unshakable,
demented refusal
of the American body politic
to come to grips
with Pogo's honest wisdom
and despairing of
any other
plausible option
since neither 'their father'
nor any other
adult in the room
appears willing to take away
this bitter cup
they follow the example
of everybody's heroes
sampled any moment
on their television screen
and light a suicidal
sacrificial fire
for the betterment
of the children
of the earth.
** ***** * **** * ******* * **** * ***** **
- Evan Hawthorn, the 20th of February, 2018
