PUT ON THE NEW YEARS HAT, WE MUST CHANGE

THE DAYS OF EXPLODING DAYS OFF

The smoke of a thousand times a thousand explosions drifts over a now silent field of nightmares. Places where people slept as war raged about them to a draw, no conclusion. All know the best wars are fought with stealth not frenetic firework explosions celebrating birth of freedoms long changed, corrupted, and lost. O nation of mine, flag of starry eyes and red, white, blue blood where have ye gone? Sailing on the mast snapping a martial salute over a battle ground where all explosives, imported from a land that freedom never grew. I light a fuse and throw the sparkling thing in the air to rattle the neighbors I’ve ignored all year.

This is now freedom: spending living money on a one night orgy of noise, explosions hoping to bring a binge of rights once owned not understood anymore. Allow the breeze, it will come by morning to clear off not only the target coordinates, smoke designated, but the lie that poverty provides only a military solution. Now to the war of holiday making, count the lost extremities and limbs blown off and made to shrapnel of skin and bone and let them laugh to tears who were kept awake. Irony is not found in the ones, every holiday that celebrate losing a palm, knuckle or knee for the rockets’ red glare, in that there is no glory. Simply waste. I will take my freedom, despite them who try to steal it, and I alone will count the day I won it; for my nation has abandoned freedom for profits sent to slave states and image makers who understand that I am not free because they tell me I am, but rather I have become so after fighting many a battle with—myself.

There is a herd to manage, to make the ewe feel good about the slaughter of her young, not for freedom but to protect the profits of the doomed who sit not in smoke designated target areas, or now silent fields of nightmares, but in gated housing tracts getting fat on lady fingers and tea once waste as it went over the side into the harbor. The cargo salvaged was fed dry to a peasant population but the wet orgy of profit came from assurance that all wars are good, for spreading the lies that freedom rings in slave made explosives lit by them who cannot read these words.


© M Durfee

7.5.2014