TERROR HAS A BROKEN LEG?

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Let the devil take horror and burn it.
He can make the world such a better place.

If we lift fear up, shake it out, and tell no one
that terror has a broken leg and cannot run
to protect danger from irrational anger.

2.
When a lawyer prosecutes his case,
does he do it with facts or the crumbling stones
of some saint’s hideaway where demons teach
conformity and how best to fit into the molds
engineered to make the safe journey
to Mount Sinai without stopping in Egypt first.

“What is New” the publican asks as he
announces closing time. How do we create
lights, cameras to record morality as a sacred
plum that we hide under like a false blanket.
We know we have transgressed
exceedingly and cannot accept lash,
embarrassment or daily lectures from
Priests and Nuns that we avoid,
stonewall and finally, admit in the end
that we were bad, and yes, "I did her,
but so did Jake, Melody and Mary."

Perhaps we need a device to measure moral
courage rather than "lies with circumstance"
set up like stars on top of sacred trees
to promote cover-ups and that blithe swagger
when we stumble pretending to be drunk.

I know, we cannot speak well,
not because we are feeble minded,
but out of "lies direct" we know now
how wrong truth presented as fact
can change the gyre, spiral and speed
of light of alternate universes under
the control of some impatient God
who plays poker better than she preaches.

Against fear, plot courage. Twain said we
are braver when death haunts, but weaker
when we choose to step-right-left-perfect.

If we cannot climb the altar to profess
relief that we have become righteous
by some accidental miracle, how
do we dance easily on top of dreams
we have had that show us as champions.

Everyone knows we cheated, and they
put the medal around our lowered necks.
Then we growl in the bowels of some cave
forbidden to twist while the hangman
cuts us down, and thousands of witnesses
ride our bones out to lake Nothing Is Like This
where sea birds peck at our drawn and
quartered limbs, and our entrails read by
soothsayers. Suddenly, as if we had
dreamed the execution, we waken when
our arms are pulled from sockets, we creep
to consciousness and confess our sins again.

Does God say it is too late? Have we passed
death too quickly, and have lost our chance
for forgiveness even when we did nothing wrong.

We have been weak, and yes have failed.
Measure our bodies, tits, ass, cocks, and other parts
so we can advertise the orgy correctly in Screw Magazine.

I ask my friend to do it quickly before I rot away
in a tempest of fakery and fornicate too freely
on that old Highway Route 66. Isn’t it better to tell
some version of truth than to lie about accidents,
intemperate teachers, Priest's, Nun's, Rabbi's
and saccharin preachers who open faith
with buckets of cash -- they have learned how
to make diversity profitable while they sing
the old time religion in 2000 dollar suits.

Eventually, after life again, and then death, and life, we
party with pure Kantian minds, forget the moral sacrifice
of death in combat or dying in Iraq by some impossible
ritual that keeps facts moribund with badly drawn circles
cut out of logic. Especially when the "Press Conference"
called to assure us that all is well ends with incoming,
IED’s and smart bombs set to explode in a reciprocal
rage when irony rides up along the banks of Tigris
and Euphrates. In that film reel, Babylonia and Sumer
fill with vermin and pestilence becomes page one,
column one, an above the fold story in the Times.

We learn to live with our dark, failed testimony.
we need mother oil for our moral completions,
so we pray, dear God, for the white man’s burden
to race away out the door to expire as invisible
puffs of daylight broken down with tornadoes
advertised in the movies by storm chasers.

Let soldiers gather to pray for life. Blood runs freely
for nothing but greed and some righteous backstory
that man is inherently amoral, immoral or in power.

3.
That's the way it was today, the newsperson said, and
there is no room for good luck or even some raunchy
sexploitation melodrama making our days more primal
when the TV market is down and the whine too hard
on the ears even when you are in love, and I am,
there is little I can do unless I rent a new body
and bring back 1969 and the Parade Committee
to adjudicate the war, immigration and how we
cheated egregiously Americans who lived in
New Orleans one day last September.

If I could bring 500,000 Americans to the streets
of several cities every weekend, at least the war
would come to a stop as it did for Johnson and Nixon.

"The Whole World Was Watching."

Let us pray that somehow the soldiers walk home,
and we build new icons for the Byzantine masks
to end our iconoclastic controversy without prejudice.

Let us pray.

4/25/06