Fists on Fire: Poetry from the Heart of the Revolution

THE WARCANE

by Jack Hirschman

Back to Part 1

2.

Palpable fear,
planetary war, and here,
in Italy, as in paura,
there’s the aura of Ur,

a domination of danger
life’s married to again
as technology to the worker,
and destruction collapsing

on a world in decline.
It was the avant-guerre,
the archaic-futurist act
of ideo-shock on the 11th,

leaving a Kala Minar,
a tower of skulls smoking
from Ground Zero in
memory of the world.
.
And the U.S. and its colonies
under god white and blue
co-opt the shock, bombing
in waves of the Total

destruction of the possible,
with vehemence in action
across the projective landscape,
with a jubilee of cool killing

that leaves the moribund
of religion on both sides
on their knees in the dust
kissing mirrors of steel.



But O, reflectors of true self,
you can’t have lived through
the machete-slashed murders
of thousands of Maya,
the rape of Grenada,
the Rwanda holocaust,
Muslims stuffed in prisons,
Palestine in rags,
the generation of poor human trees
petrifying in streets of cities,
Daily drubbings by the quick
brown foxes of lies,
the tear-gas of Seattle,
Genoa’s bleeding eyes;

you can’t have seen that Bosnian
beggar kid showing his burned body
to the Zagreb café, the bag lady sleeping
under Bologna portico or autostrada ramp,
the gypsy dumps at the edge of Firenze,
the barricades of stacks of dollars
and investments keeping Islam’s masses
in a utopia of myopic ‘Other Side’
without raising one eyebrow higher than the other
with respect to an attack on the U.S.A.

Now War has come over
and is laying
bombs in all our cracks.
Want to feel safe?

Ask the dead baby twins,
Mohammed and Bibi,
cluster-bombed in a village
near Kabul.

They’ll burn you with
that same eyebrow-gesture
raised in eternal irony
even in their hairless dust.



Want to feel desire?
Desire’s the need to eat
a dog from behind
and inside and out.

Such pain needs killers
who can pay and will pay.
They need her
oin.

They need more
phine.
They’ll all be dead or
junkies come Christmas time.

And that bitch’s luscious
ass being tongued and
ass-hole reamed by that war-dog
on his knees on a mountainside

is why, even in flight,
the Taliban are whinnying,
thrusting rifles into the air,
shaving their beards with bayonets.

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