The soil is Sour
Invaded primates find playmates on
Divergent hemispheres
The splendor of mass suicides take hold of
Our better judgment
An incapacity to coexist
Baffles the refugees
Makes it impossible to see
The point of rising each morning
We are fatigued
From mourning for strangers
While others pretend no strangers are present
Our DNA collected from islands
Forever under occupation
Keeps us well stocked with misdirected anger
Less is more
Unless
You have more than others
Our neighbors pray to be unreal
Spend more time engaged with screens and gadgetry
Than trying to feel the wind
With a flicker time discards us
Our lesser selves are mailed to
Incinerators lined up beyond the city walls
Cold rocks poke up through sky
Our reservoir is dry
The soil is sour
Our stomachs are sick
We live with a permanent hangover
Our heads pounding
As the coffee is brewing
We hang over the kitchen counter
Trying to piece together
Last evening's series of events
Gamma rays sift through the ceiling
Three decades pass and you
Don't remember one moment of it
The toilet seat is down
Loved ones claim you are color blind
The names of the things begin to sound odd
Your past was troubled but your
Present is dangerously quiet
You want to do more with your fingers
You want to know less
Bronze objects are hung that
Were once tools of survival
Now kitschy artifacts viewed
By paying customers
Who presume they are smarter
Than their predecessors
The soil is sour
Our mother's milk spoiled
We are reduced to the
Plastic and fiber that binds us
The Soil is Sour
Paul Tibbets
Born February 23rd, 1915.
Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force.
Awarded the Distinguished Service Cross,
The Distinguished Flying Cross,
And the Legion of Merit.
They also gave you a Purple Heart
To compensate for the one you lacked.
On August 6th, 1945
You dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima
Weeks after Japan had already surrendered to the Allies.
You murdered 100,000 human beings,
Outliving them all by more than 60 years.
You played the Devil’s loyal bureaucrat,
Taking away their right to hug their mothers,
Embrace their spouses,
Learn to play guitar, or
Taste another ice cream cone.
You were once quoted as saying
That you never lost a single night of sleep
Over having been the one to drop the bomb,
Stating that you had a job to do and
You did yours quite well.
You reminded everyone that it was done
For the causes of Freedom and Democracy,
An insipid irony,
As I am positive that the residents of Hiroshima
Were never given the opportunity to democratically vote
On whether or not their lives would be obliterated
In a single calamitous flash of light.
Paul Tibbets,
The most accomplished serial killer that ever lived,
A terrorist by the most rigid definition of the word,
Devoutly proud to be American.
With one flight across the Japanese sky
You forever perverted our faith in reason,
Our notion of consequence,
Our sense of compassion.
The Buddhists believe that one karmic infraction
Holds quantum repercussions for a soul.
If you cut the throat of one cow in a slaughterhouse
You will be reincarnated 1,000 times as a
Cow in a meat factory murdered ambivalently,
Your blood spilled again and again
Until the debt is paid,
The lesson learned.
It is not enough to hope that you will be reborn
10,000,000 times as a shirtless village boy
Disintegrated by a nuclear missile
Dropped on your town square as
You are innocently skipping to the playground.
I am not convinced the lesson would be learned.
You who outlived them all;
The man who eliminated an entire city of families
And claims he never lost a night of sleep over it,
Proving the superiority of U.S. military power
And the inferiority of its moral code,
Proving also that there is nothing more frightening
Than a man who is capable of “just following orders.”
The associated press claims that on
November 1st, 2007 you finally left this life,
But I will maintain the idea that you never lived at all.
First Friday
Pale mountains boxed in steel roll by the battered window
Old bottle caps tinkle beneath the soles of retired biker
Emtpiness has become a national landmark
Caravans of pickups waddle forward
Displacing the abandoned manor
Where biohazards in blue jeans
Drop off their offspring for the weekend
A pedestrian questions why folks put
Kitchen appliances on their front porch
Only the insects seem to comprehend
The endlessness of this tableaux
Battlegrounds ferment into playgrounds
During the changing of the stoplights
The students become deaf in surround sound
Retailers are obliterated by their daily routines
Replanted as songs camp counselors sing
To lull the scouts to sleep
Out back two orange boys
Fulfill their community service
Harpooning trash left behind from last nights party
Leaving the waste in a dumpster for
A daydreaming cancer patient to mold
Into a gray talisman the city council
Will demand us to worship
During our most inconspicuous Mondays
Lateral movement
We pay others to see the world for us
Pay them to tell us what it means
We pay them to dream and live for us
To lie for us to feel the guilt for us
The seasons do not change for us
Here everything is replaceable like our artifical turf
We squash ants between our fingertips
Without any concept of consequence
Afraid we don't deserve the chance to take a chance
Our most violent act becomes our refusal to exist
Our resistence is made by flipping coins into defunct wells
We raise flags and children that do not belong to us
(Somewhere there is optimism embedded in all of this)
Vamps
Palm or palmetto
Use these vices as a vice to grip
The vestiges of adolescent self-confidence
Splintered
Fractured at each limb
The mud I trudge through
Spread over the shag carpet
Like butter on bread
Swallow used needles from
Obsolete turntables
spitting them back at the
Board of directors
Until they are pinned to their
Sense of self-importance
Like butterflies to a picture frame
Pounding on stretched goat hide
To hide from hunters in search of fresh game
Our loose jeans and piercings
Frightens and excites them
Our deformations welcome additions
If they can be used to defame us
It is not permissible to complain
Abstain from the abuse
The kids are just as lost
Like the funds allegedly allocated for their
Educations
This world has made them anonymous
Alienates them
Chides them to plug into the boogie monsters
We tried to keep away in bedtime stories
They want much less than we can offer
They want to be real
Recognized
No longer downsized to wage labor
They dream of false fame
Because their master tells them they are no one
Unless they play the game
And those with palms extended
Are viewed as the menace
And cut down like palmettos in a nature reserve
On Southern shores
Replaced by plastic fauna
Because it is much more cost effective
Take care of the dead
The living are too burdensome
They take away from the overhead
Rather mummify the whole world
Than go into the red
We are splintered
Undecided on which plantation master
To cut cane for
Went to work for the local bodeguero but
The nighborhood mafia has already taken their cut
Of his wife and child
What more is there to make
When surrenders appears to be
The most effective revolutionary option?
