Before the Shadow

After a 2011 Tartus Port poured into my goblet I drank deep as Tartarus.
Dread rolled past my tongue, causing my lungs to shiver as from a winter breeze or the teasing touch of fingertips cold as bone.
I swallowed lamentation, silently gagging on the smell of iron, smoke, and charred meat.
The festive feast on our long table is festooned with the silence of men who left too immediately for an awareness of their departure to appear.
Intelligent gossip slides from derisive lips and hides its' hushed meaning in the seams of this eternal campaign season.
The words are smeared with din and quite like smokeless fire unraveling the matter it travels through.
I can not make out the words but I recognize the tone ringing through me in a shudder-inducing cacophony: contempt.
Waves rise in invisible tides through us.
They share the flavor of the wine we're served, recognizable from its' aftertaste of massacre.

The Lie Never Experienced

Shake hands in a shaken cradle while shells crater the burning cities.
Making an armistice requires armed soldiers shooting citizens.
Policemen obey their captains like pirates charmed and sold on intimidation.
Bankers release no nations from debts and mutineers are taught regret.
Bandits cease raiding when they're colder than a disarmed NRA.
Thieves sneak food from farmers' yards, traveling far and working hard.
Every administration kills for a rumor. Where were you during the revolution?
Resentment or acceptance grow; both responses impoverish hearts of soothing lotion.
Love's a balm bombs turn to fuel, burning earnest optimists, would-be pacifists.
Whether or not the Bible's true one brother slew another in man's 2nd generation.
Very many are born straight slayers. Survivors convert to the movement.

Escape from DC

Feeling bowdy?
You should know this club's bouncers are bigger than GigaBowser
will punch you out of your trousers
across the saloon
catering through the air
like a cartoon
landed on the opposite side of the room
shaken like a howitzer hit yer wits out yer head
lost your pretense of senses when knuckles went boom
how it'd feel is unreally horrible
you'd drool like a baby adorable
see little birdies in a circle
walking nerdy as Erkel
talking suspended by bitten tongue
it's good fine ale makes gals act young
like Gale who giggles though she's a mum
at your inventive inebriated invectives
we need to get the heck out of here
before someone shouts back
I'll pick up the slack
put your arm across my shoulders
the crowd is our first hurdle
if Tajicks don't respect us Kurds'll
doesn't the cold coming through the door feel nice?
don't stumble off I won't tell you twice
now we're out sit down let the beer wear off
your dance was less grind and more Baryshnikov.

Reichsfreiheit Kuhschweizer

It's glorious to read the brave few fighting to maintain self-control against the slavery-afflicted many pressed into battle against defiers. Seeds of American Government extend before the enlightenment, outside Britain, in Maximillain's rule. Probably elsewhere and earlier still influences go unacknowledged. Treaties and divisions of authority are time-outs on constant violence but outbreaks of fights continue b/c none are satisfied w/the arrangement. I find the medieval Europeans actually more enlightened in some ways than modern Americans: they fought to keep what they had, farmers defected in droves, bitched and moaned when kept from crops to fight. Now the happiness/pride of many folks only seems to be in self-subversion. A handsome one, born of fire, a meadow, arsonist + a woman devoted to Mars, favored grace, from Swabia=the younger handsome arsonist born of fire in a meadow (covering a second nature of war-devotion, favor from there, and Swabian origin?).