Politicks -- A Poem by B. A. Oard

[Here's another poem I wrote 20 years ago and have only now rediscovered in an old, forgotten notebook from the middle of the 1990s. Did I really write this? I feel a bit like the Burroughs character in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch who comes out of a drug haze to find his novel already written for him by his hallucinated animate typewriter.]




Politicks


The political is a panicked eyeball stabbed with a sword of
      summer grass:
Television is a two-way mirror
in The General's interrogation room;
Economists impale themselves on tusks of murdered elephants
while The General fucks a knot-hole in a mortar-blasted palm
      tree
as The Secretary of State bursts into flame while surfing off
      Kauai


and children on the beach are building
houses we will never understand.


A 747 engorged with tourists explodes above the Technicolor
      jungle;
Plaid shirts purple shorts and boiled tennis shoes hang like
      laundry from the vines;
A peasant's shadow is reflected in a man-high fragment of the
      fuselage
sprouting knifelike from the steaming blackened earth;
He checks his hair and notices the smell
of burning pig
rising to the nostrils of the gods.
Television camera crews parachute to the rescue as The
      General
finally comes against his palm


and children on the beach are building
houses we refuse to understand.


The General tours his torture chamber listening to the soothing
      music
streaming from his screaming concrete rooms;
in his head a silver box with wires red and green controls
the bomb that turns the jungle red and green;
his eyes compile lists of enemies endless long. He sees them
skinned alive amidst the cheering of the marketplace and
grinds their bones to dust to feed the poor.
The President Of The United States commends his
      humanitarianism and
courageous adherence to the principals of a free market
      economy


and children on the beach are building
houses we will trample into sand.