by Katharine Schulz
The rain runs and throws and falls
on a humdrum drown.
It’s trying to cool the world down
It’s trying
It’s trying
It’s trying
but it can’t reach everywhere
The rain doesn’t fall through tin roofs
It wants the war to end You all want the war to end
so we’re surely trying
surely madly deeply!
I’m sure you’re trying, but the Apocalypse already passed
War was fought and won and the spoils may be on your tree but they are not in your eyes
They do not look back at you in the mirror
Next to the small orange buildings on your tin shelves
prescription city
They do not look back at you
So why are you trying
Cleaned chloroform cholesterol man, scrub our aluminum free of soot and napalm
You saved us!
the boys, they saved us!
Come home and we reward you with warmth
Relax into the crease of your gestapo leather couch
with the ever present knowledge that even rain has done more than you could
Our generations sweet little dictator
Kim Jong Hussein
Fidel Amin
laugh at the death laugh at the deaths laugh at death
To laugh at death is to laugh at god
so do you keep laughing until the dance is done or until you’ve melted a gatling gun
Our unknown soldier walks a king’s highway
or Whatever the radio chooses to tell us this weekend
Are any of these militant thoughts my own?
My fellow booksmart revolutionaries
Shout short and sweet little slogans that look nice on jackets
ever so pretty on placard from the crowd or ink on a canvas
Are these guerilla daydreams ours?
It seems to me
that a van loaded with weapons is nothing more than grey painted school busses,
lying complacent as a wet dog, to bring us back to base
to Mommy and Daddy
Daddy berate and hoots at these foreigners
These Commies!
But has Daddy seen a bloody body fall at his feet?
Unfortunately for him,
he’s seen just the same as me.
You’ve got just as much tar in your eyes, Daddy
You’ve got just as much tin
binding you with its reflection
Words by Katharine Schulz, Stanley Kubrik, The Smiths, Francis Ford Coppola, The Doors, Talking Heads
© 2021 Katharine Schulz All rights reserved.
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