The Military Industrial Complex to Vladimir Putin

(An Open Letter)

We pay our rebels well to strut and flex.
In Chechnya you kill yours with dispatch.
The mission’s to install Ike’s dreaded complex
then pour all kinds of money down its hatch.

A quagmire finds no purchase in advance.
A surge that truly surges doesn’t pay.
Better to drop some ordnance over France
then hammer Chad and pummel Paraguay.

Your mission creep lacks proper execution.
War profits should be savored a la carte.
Yet looks deceive as, short on war ambition,
your stature screams Napoleon Bonaparte.

There’s room for all aboard the Good Ship Terror.
It’s just we gotta carve the pie up right
or else commit a truly fatal error
and slip into a truly honest fight.

Norman Ball can be reached at gspressnow@gmail.com. Visit his blog Full-Spectum Domino to keep abreast. An excerpt of his latest book Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments is available at the Museum of American Poetics (MAP). He also has an eBook out on the impending currency reset Eye Am Eye Press, 2015. He can be reached at: gspressnow@gmail.com. Read other articles by Norman.