I can’t sleep.
Or, I can
and did
for three hours
but I continue waking
into a Stephen King nightmare
too real to ignore
because I feel isolated
in this quagmire
of hopeless history.
In this my collective nightmare,
President Trump goes to Saudi Arabia
like Mr. Smith goes to Washington,
bold as an August justice day,
to sell 110 billion dollars of U.S. manufactured ballistics
in this heart of Middle East thirst
for violence–
like selling dope to jonesing crack addicts.
This deal is signed in the blood of our children
then celebrated in full glare of multi media spotlights
with blood dripping off our chins
and hands.
This is a really sweet success
for climate health and freedom fighters
and, oh yes,
our wealthy industrious friends
who rake in their riches
on the strong back
of capitalism’s vaguely cannibalistic WinLose addictions.
This nightmare continues on to Israel
where Jewish leaders wait
until our blood-stained ambassador
of international arm-sales corruption
turns his back
before at last declaring their alarm,
echoed at his next stop
in the Vatican
where even this home of history’s Crusades
finds such dark triumphalism
a bit too treacherously much.
Yet, as often as I awake within this bloodshed bacchanal
blaring with unseemly deep night trumpets
I also wake to total BusinessAsUsual silence
here in this U.S. home.
Here it feels alien accepted
that this is whom we have near bloodlessly become,
crack and frack and oil addicts
selling our preferred markets of death
in exchange for oil
or cash,
our democratically held self-esteem so low
we cannot remember our lowest common denominator
used to be a shared multiculturing Golden Rule.
We have better stuff to sell
for hope of light
not deadly despair.
So here I sit
in the middle of this night’s terrifying domestic silence,
wide awake with guilt
about such dark leadership
we have loosed in a troubling Earth
longing for even just one drop of climate sanity.
110 billion dollars re-invested.
Ours
to grease these well oiled wheels
of military industrializing tycoons
even General President Eisenhower
warned us against.
I guess healing our planet
and our extending brother-sister relationships
will have to wait
until all our guns
and oil,
bombs
and hate,
soldiers
and their innocent children
are gracelessly gone.
I doubt that dawn will ever come again,
yet worry what new macabre celebrations
in vampire cannibalistic capitalism
may appear across our morning screens,
knocking on and out and through our back doors
while our children sleep
in too short innocence.
110 billion for nihilistic death and terror sales
and not one entrepreneurial peep in protest
of sacrilegious prancing.
It is this screaming silence of abject immoral despair
that continues awaking me,
hoping I might see midnight lights
of kindred nightmare souls
haunted by such dark blood business
baldly broadcast as if to help us better sleep.
I toss and turn alone
while other childlike immigrants on Earth
sleep through 110 billion bloody nightmares.
gdill52 