(Second/Last in a series)
We beat the bushes in search of tigers, bryght,
burning in the English manner and found
instead our sundials filled with sand or sheltered
mites and dust, it matters so little when it gets
between and beneath your toes. O unfecund leader,
you were splendid in your mahogany robe,
your amber tiara made for a princess! you,
virility a-flow, prancing a two-step around the airs
of banjos, mouth-harp all a-go-go. Here were
our stairs to history, to legacy, to your manhood
unrefined and your stumbling footfalls, how the halls
of oak resounded with your arrival, we stocked
the dogwood cooler with the finest Blue Ribbon.
Our shores held, their flat-picked spears
attuned to the minorest of thematic variations,
we horsed the rivers with Bill and his friend Bill,
we guessed a full canyon away, and gave sacred
name to the honorific horror of what we’d caused.
As if, you said, except we do forget, don’t we?
we do beworth our lachrymose claws of earth
against the sand, and quell the trestles of bridges
into sonar’d war machines. Ares! Ares!
with your akimbo’d yohimba dance all skirt, all
pimp and circumcisionstance, how you budgeted
your weapons! how gleeful you found their
dissolution! my leader, how at your squall
spent was I, o my captain, we marched in line
our destiny for the very eons to behold, as
every line is ultimately only about itself, as it knows
itself to be, we trade the memory of summits
for briefings benumbed to such traits as truth,
trysting our will to your decisive bend of process
provocative in its enormity, curious in outdated
notions of ethics: great doyen! beswoop amongst us
once more and make us whole with your puffed treasure
chest of compassion, with your benumbingly fatal war.
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved
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