"Bushwacked"
A
poem by Corey
Langer
Blind faith spreads across the face
Of this nation
like kudzu
I see
The natural world
Fall prey to our obsessive search
For mineral wealth.
I see
Oil coating the arctic landscape
Seals and walruses glued
To ice-floes as if stuck
To molasses
I see
Political ostriches ignore
Sexual reality, teenagers
Bear offspring against their will
Unwanted children in the Third World cast off
Like flotsam and jetsam from a sinking vessel
Because the radical right denies
Their mothers the right to choose
When they conceive,
Or when to conceive
I see
Segregationalists masquerade
As Born-again Egalitarians
And I hear
Trent Lott
Sing the major refrain of "White Christmas"
Over and over, after he’s botched
"Kumbaya" and "We shall Overcome"
I see
The superficial artifice of reality
Sugarcube reason, melt
on our tongues
And the antic cretin
Reduction of nations and intelligence
And psychic longing
Into animal, vegetable, and mineral
Stripped of context or value
I see
Moral scolds like William Bennett
Castigate one president’s indiscretions,
While treasuring another’s
(and ignoring his own)
as he cruises
In the limousine of hypocrisy
Decrying the politics of personal destruction
Which he helped invent
I see
The world fragment
Like a cracked egg
Black and white, rich and poor
Continent by continent
Pouring out in gelatinous globs
Leaving a hollow core
And fragile crust
This doesn’t go over easy
I see
Embryonic bias
Gestate into flinty
Human hatreds
Breach births in a dark medieval cave
I see
Osama run free
And the Madrasas proclaim ten American deaths
For every Muslim (that’s
their mortal calculus)
while we focus on the wrong despot
His mustachioed lips
Fulfilling the role of the archetype
Villain in a global melodrama
Only this is no act
And the bullets kill
We are not fools
We are not a parade
of morons
Be worried
Be very worried.
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