Quote:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”--Martin Luther King

Friday, January 24, 2014

Polemic in the Morning









Nightscape in Empire

Sometimes it
feels as if we are
making a last stand,
spread around the
globe like soulless
parasites attached
to the defenseless,
suicidal and unborn
in descending darkness.

We have made
too many enemies
to fall back now,
adorned with lies;
our goodwill blackened
out by a painter
adding a night sky
to a canvass depicting
the relentless fall 
of good sense and
the rise of enmity. 

The hysteria has
boiled up in our blood,
a green stream
trickling through the
the body politic;
our chemotherapy is
comprised of bullets
and drone strikes.

Our heart is weak,
run through with toxic
deployments on
every continent,
in every land; we have
become killers seeking
something, anything
to murder for money.

Our old-fashioned
utopian dreamers who left
the mainstream years ago
grow sicker and begin to
heave, lose their hair,
groan and imagine an
end that shouldn't have
carried this weight,
this maddening pain.

We made too many
enemies and now we
must suffer like a
drinker who didn't
quit until it was too late,
like a driver who didn't
slow down at the end
of the road and crashed
through somebody's
gate and flower beds,
through a modest house,
before turning upside
down in a ditch,
tires spinning,
gas fumes spilling;
three or more dead, another
night in another country.


TS

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