Poem

June 12, 2004

“If memory is to have a mouth, it must be mine.”

They have buried a President on every network. For days

extolling his chipper good cheer, wisdom

of the saints, the grand vision. Wolf Blitzer,

dimmest and most credulous of men,

shocked by the ordinary, turning belly-up

to power, begs silence for the plane

 bearing the exalted corpse.

Idiocy abounds:

“Consider what’s on that plane”,.

“The closest thing we have to aristocracy”, “American royalty”,

“Prince Charles is here”, breathless adolescents

convincing themselves the party they’ve crashed

is the only room with food and wine on earth.

Handsome soldier supporting the widow’s arm

“He’s a “warrior”, Blitzer crows,

“a special elite”, lest we think him conscripted

only as a rail for the frail arm.

The cathedral was packed

on every channel. Rank  and file

Knights, Queens, Bishops and Rooks

 calibrating nods and smiles

measured against ideas of their own majesty.

Was Christ himself this meek and mild?

Depends on who you ask.

Not the union he betrayed to its enemies

Or writers he snitched to the FBI .

Not the dead women and children of Tegucigalpa,

or the common graves at El Mozote

 the firing of the Times reporter

who uncovered the murders of the hungry

Two hundred dead  Marines in Lebanon

remembered by running home

 to declare war on Grenada.

No one asked those condemned to the streets

with stroke of his Presidential pen

the dazed and crazed  released

to the gritty compassion of cigarette butts

piss filled alleys with no pretense of care.

The Hummer-bummer the State rides rough

over the fragile crust of the world

witless porkers choking on the grease

they’ve rendered from the dead.

“He ended the Cold War”,

Refrained as a chant, as if it were not Gorbachov

unilaterally stopped his nation’s

bombs; released Sakharov, coughed up

 perestroika and glasnost, stirred

Democracy into the Russian borscht.

Playing lead while until our winsome zombie

was shamed before the world

finally desperate to snare a supporting role.

What is this dumb show? I need love

less than I need truth.

 

Ancient Welsh bards stood beside

the Queen in rank, allowed three colors

in their robes, granted the power  to stop armies

 by announcing the winners. I cannot bear

this thinnest gruel renamed as stew. Cannot

disgrace the dead,

by electing a Carnival pitchman a God.

 

Between the ads, spectacle for the glory of the State.

 The imposing cathedral, the stained-glass Christ,

the aren’t-we-special people

smearing the rancid fiction of the State

in their hair. They get the details

right in the wrong painting,

and in the end, bow

only to that no man defeats.