six voices among the airwaves of today

Code Of Nomads With Little To Lose
Achieving anything at all takes balls
of muscles working hard; takes agile brains
alert to border squalls and heeding calls
of opportunity for causing strains
among the richer, snatching their remains
up first. Go further, help their children drown
in crib-taught doubt that enervates. Cast down
whole tribes in spirals, fearful they’ll be gassed
unless they do our will. Expand our frown:
shake knees to keep heads buried up their past.

Arriving From The West
Eternal life of ease, unruffled life
that moves from crib until retirement’s watch
is broken without serious fear, where ‘knife’
is but a tool, a metaphor to notch
our poesy. The Poll Pot horrid botch
of lives, its piling up of just-dead skulls
is gross, grotesque. This put-out food for gulls
in patterns we choose not to see demeans
our sense of good. We banish them as culls
and rejects. But, they’ve reached the Philippines.

Arriving from the East
When Istanbul became a Turkish town,
when Byzantine’s last emperors lost the day
and faded out in 1453
(or were impaled, the epic details slip),
it was another eager apex step
for ideas growing stronger still today
among the brethren in the Middle East,
South Africa, and maybe San Antoine,
about the proper role for Roman gods
and you and me descended from their spawn.
To be converted may exceed our reach
and once the Jihad beats us we may find
our love of dogs and barbecue is seen
as evidence for pogrom cleansing’s need
to purge us Europeans who have spread
and ruled the pecking order for a time
that we, used to our riches, think won’t end.

Don’t Worry
We give them tribute, call it foreign aid,
and are astounded not to get back love.
Why aren’t our good deeds lauded? We have paid
at least the finger back of our iron glove
we’ve wrapped in velvet, calling God above
to sanction ways we’ve brought them with the sword
along with wasting sickness and The Word.
How dare these others claim their god is true;
that now the times abandon us; raise Kurd
and man of Bosnia and near-dead Sioux?

Do Worry
Now never ever venture to forget
that we don’t need ourselves to criticise
ourselves. Such ways will only bring regret
to those of us surviving. We’ll be wise
and worthy slaves of hard men who despise
our private slant on what is free and just.
Like apes and bees, all creatures made from dust,
our fate’s to kill or die in the attempt
to stretch our genes and memes until they thrust
all rivals into graves. On guard. Pre-empt!

six voices among the airwaves of today
Killing Fields The Way of Life?