Dichotomy

disclaimer: this would be a poem. Insert monologue here about how poems are not necessarily based on any truth whatsoever, nor are they necessarily any reflection of the author’s beliefs. With that said, well, you know me…

We must protect our turf against outlaw regimes even if this entails atomic gleam.
Where once the land continued past the edge the earth is knocked clean, as we pledge
allegiance without reading the fine print like resting yr head on the pillow w/out removing the mint.
We must disarm the ghetto and give guns to the official militia, (none of whom are senators’ sons), and we will enact our television fantasy of John Wayne and Dirty Harry in hyper-masculine ecstasy!
We will take it to the desert, sell it as a pay-per-view concert:
The Outlaw Regime versus Wild West—Without our UN tagteam.
Live Rematch: US vs. Iraq!
Buy the lunchbox, t-shirt, backpack!
We’ve sold out our citizens, our culture.
There must be something in the water there, something that makes them all so angry.
Us/them Crazy/angry.
There must be [oil] in the water, and we imbibe that as excuse to slaughter.
The president has ordered troops to take a pill that will make it guiltless to kill.
Robots have an easier time obeying the chain of command.
They follow through as planned and die in their smiling prime.
Robots are expendable, rebuildable—not born with a spoon up the nose—not worth more than the rifle they carry, and are rechargeable.
It goes to show—goes to blow-by-blow award-winning coverage on the evening news.
news you can use to rock the vote.
The vote we rocked…ballots rigged like raffles at the church bazaar.
He rocked, she rocked, we rocked while the clock sped from November across winter,
and there was no consensus, and there was democratic chaos.
We, as in the brotherhood of broken states who fixated on Clinton’s boxers instead of forced burkhas;
We, who gyrated in the New Year as suicide bombers descended on Israel.
And explode in Northern Ireland, Chechnya, and explode over all those places ignored by our media, and we think, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to go, this broken down connection.
We’re supposed to be siblings and I guess we are, disowned.
All I hear is how we’ve got to protect our own we’ve got to make our presence known.
I object to guilt trips based on lack of evidence when we reverse our policy of innocent until proven guilty.
And there are everyday explosions that we turn away from because there is a hot new unreality show to pacify and entertain us.
Us/ them Crazy/angry out of touch/out of sight.
out of our minds with fear.
Did you buy the fear of smallpox and rage of a madman? Did you?
Are you buying the propaganda?
I’m not.