Foul

FOUL

by Tom Cherwin

I saw the worst minds of my generation destroy by badness,
snarling hysterical craven;
dragging their sons and daughters through the Muslim streets at dawn looking for an angry WMD;
devilheaded hitmen burning for the ancient underground connection
to the tarry pipeline in the machinery of blight;
who spiritual poverty and hollow-eyed and low sat up scheming
in the unnatural light of high-rise apartments
floating across the tops of cities contemplating Britney Spears;
who sold their scribes to Moloch and their scruples to Lucre under the Flag and saw dust devils swirling on red deserts illuminated by missiles;
who passed through Ivied halls with dull dyslexic eyes hallucinating Armageddon and tragedy among the scholars of war;
who were passed by the academies for cribbing and cheating
and cheerleading intrepid fight songs
from the pinstriped sidelines of gridiron battlefields;
who cowered in draft-free rooms wrapped in suits and ties and flags, burning their souls in wastebaskets
and listening to the cash registers through the wall;
who tore down Guantanamera to erect Guantanamo;
who poured a mix of Arabs and Americans, said abracadabra,
and created Abu Ghraib;
who worshipped jail cells and blasphemed stem cells
and outlawed brain cells;
who fired the cast of Law & Order, replaced them with bad actors,
and reran it as The Gong-zalez Show;
who forced No Child Left Behind on America
and No Child Left on Iraq;
who made a religion of oil and an oil spill of religion;
who deconstructed an economy
but couldn’t remember how to put it together again;

and whose worstest mind of them all
was a nucular waste site in a Stetson and a smirk;
a hoked-up Hummer-Hummina-Hummina-Hummina hybrid,
a human Humvee for and from the nonmilitary but decidedly militant back roads of Texas and featuring matching MPG and IQ,
who got about 40 miles of bad road to the 10-gallon hat, or 4 miles a gallon, bullied better drivers off the beltway, and snirked about it;
who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth
that blocked the path of pronunciation and proper syntax;
and who later, honoring the oil and dishonoring the Ivy,
would pollute the air and the airwaves with equal abandon;
who, Roving through Laredo, scaled the highest hustings hoisting
a tray of Rumsfeld and Cokes for the New World Order crowd;
who, high on hooch and hubris, Cheneyed himself to the White House gates, kept the people out, named himself king and called it executive privilege, and built therein an oligarchy
that years later, like a Burning Bush, began to go up in smoke,
whose signals, when he finally learns to read them,
will spell out not “Mission Accomplished,” but--
because even the president of the United States
must sometimes have to stand naked,
and because not even presidents, however illiterate,
can subvert poetic justice--
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humvee together again.”

copyright 2009, Tom Cherwin