Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers / One hundred million angels singin’/
Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum.
— Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash will sing the last song ever played.
Left behind on a scorched beach with no one to hear,
grinding away on someone’s forgotten tape deck.
We never learned. We jumped into the game
with both feet, eager and righteous, and always
misinformed and willfully blind and understudied.
There’s a joy to numbness. It’s why we chase
it so religiously. We know what’s right, in our
souls we know, but hey, we deserve to have hope, right?
What’s a few dead kids, as long I can feel good about voting
for a woman of color, or a gay man, or another faux-liberal white guy.
They can’t be all bad says your corporate mouthpiece.
There’s been so many promised red lines over the years
the streets have become solid red, bled into paste:
hear them crying, burning, dying if they’re lucky.
Love is dead. The lobby made it so.
Once you know that the people who get elected
are the worst examples of human beings on the planet
you almost come to peace with it. Like
the hiker in that Krakauer book who
said the mosquitoes were so bad that you had
to just lay back and let them suck your blood.
I’m that beaten man. Washington wins. The lobby
wins. This I am sure of. I’m sure of a few other
things as well: Money wins (every time). People
don’t care about people they don’t know. Peace
is not profitable. If Israel says it, it’s a lie.
If Washington says it, it’s a lie. If the corporate
media says it, it’s a lie. If the billionaires
say it, it’s a lie. If the cops say it, it’s a lie.
More things I know: Representative government
is dead (was it ever alive?). The war machine runs
like a top. Hate always beats love no matter what
Robert Mitchum or Radio Raheem act out. Hate has
more power. Hate brainwashes better. Hate is organized
yet thrives on chaos. Children with bullets in their brain
don’t make people ill anymore. Starving people
getting shot in food lines don’t make
people angry anymore. The bullied are the bullies.
I want to enjoy NBA basketball games. I want
to write novels. I want dig movies and walks
on the beach and cookouts and coffee shops.
But there are too many monsters now, maybe there
always was and I’m just getting better at spotting them,
or maybe they just don’t care anymore if we see them.
If Johnny is right, we’ll hear the angels on judgement day
and we’ll be able to look back on what a mess we’ve left behind.
Chances are that big kettle drum will still be the sound
of a bomb killing a child. After all we’ve got use them up.
You can’t take em with you when you go. Grease the skids
with young blood. And the multitudes marching? That’s just the dead-footed
zombies dropping off their ballots and expecting something different.
