Thirty-nine of Fifty

I need power over tales of blood,
over epics of blood streaming from babies,
their tiny tectonic skulls, the splashed dots of exclamation points
littering the story.






I am viral and fevered with it; the story has burnt off the soles of my feet,
has put out my eyes with its thumbs. Emetic, it draws up the full net of
vomit, my useless ignorance, before I dope off to sleep within
the sickbed of tent-folded newspaper.








I dream in the time zone of the dispossessed: A madman whispering
on until his throat bleeds, they ceaselessly reiterate the bombs, the gunsights.
A crazed man who keeps screaming, they dislocate their shoulders
on the Uzi kick or on the stone outmuscling its preadolescent launch.

The enraged, the betrayed warriors have chased the lunatic over the border
to beat him silent, to spill their own brains. In the untrustworthy hush
they trail behind, it mutters,
the container of God, it groans, it prostrates eastward or drapes the shawl,
and utters its ancient heart murmur. Who but God can hear it, the earth filling
the mouth, the soil of Jerusalem beloved and choking on the tongue.






He cannot be edited, the man who says, My life for land inviolate,
self-governed, holy. The privilege is his to tell his children it is all a lie, the promise
of God and their father's desire. The right is his to reform his generations
with opposite truth, the right his alone to say, my belief is worth no war,
my legacy is worth no fight, and it matters not who I am
with or without my land—he is not ours for correction, who snipes and dismembers,
his children not ours to remake in the image of a God who would forsake purity
for peace—a God who has never existed. How do I invent that?









I am sick to death with incapacitation that does not blink
with a remote control. I have no merit in your lives, no right to do a thing
but watch you contort, bleed, and burn each other as though you are not people
being force-fed me as medicinal entertainment—

I can turn you off as though you do not exist or I can
watch you from comfort as though you do not exist, as though you are
only a story I might control, a fable that disappears when I dream—








To my custodially appointed government
and profit-whipped journalists who incidentally vaccinate me
with liquifying humans and the blood of babies, kills and deaths,
so I will feel no humility and shame for the bombs I drop with my own vote,

to them I shout this gibberish they won't even hear,
feeble and unprepared as an allergic child, hysterically flailing and fending
away the foul flask of penicillin moving toward her mouth—stop,
stop!—stop—






Make me.



Back to Poems List
The Sun Room
In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you
as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.
Completely destroy them.
Every place where you set your foot will be yours:
from the desert to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates river to the western sea.
No man will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you,
will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land,
wherever you go.
I have heard the prayer and plea you have made before me;
I have consecrated this temple, which you have built, by putting
my Name there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.
I am going to make Jerusalem a cup
that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling. . .  On that day,
when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an
immovable rock for all the nations.
All who try to move it will
injure themselves.
If you ever forget
the Lord your God, I testify against you that you
will surely be destroyed. Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you,
so you will be destroyed for not obeying
the Lord your God.
Into the exhausted silence,
with the voice of his whole world,
the Lord says,