Frightening Times

Here is the Dear Daddy Committee,
all of microphone flash & camera blaze,
all of systematic prestige & personalities
bungling brutal & blunt beneath
the white washing machine
screening their own smog, its fence
of fingers pointing, recorded in sound
bytes deaf ears, shouted down,
take for gospel, or else are gone blind eyes…

Oh, may your own shadows recoil
upon you & belch you back to your pack
queuing & conspiring under all of the lives roasted.
May the children of the Rosenbergs find you
amid the names named & the Hollywood
innocents driven to dust bowls on the set
of a packed up Western;
yes, may they find & see you to your own
ghost town of the disappeared.

Do I rise from such atrocities
here in my own history & the present day
news slap a harbinger for the slain future?

Yes, I rise amid the dying, hard eyed, acerbic,
a survivor with no crime save these times
to be feared & their reckoning, but what justice
in the revolution, what mercy in the next campaign?

Oh all you daddies, little Hitlers, little mothers,
in your bright, your marionette courts,
when the strings are at last severed,
the jaws finally agape, may your tongues loll
derelict in the homes of cut nursing,

the very tenements of your yellow greed.

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