Two Poems: The Briefing and Will Justice Come
THE BRIEFING
You are new here and have been given the keys.
I’ve been asked to lay out the big picture
Of how the world works – from our point of view
Without the feel good bullshit.
You are being paid too much to need that.
First, understand that it is all related
And it’s accelerating at historical hyperspeed
Driven by global finance capital (that’s us)
Money moving in milliseconds
Chasing growth to keep ahead of
Falling demand
Brought on by the global race to the bottom in wages
And then the race to replace even low wages with robots
The wealth gap ever concentrating the goodies at the top
While humanless factories
Or Bangladeshi girls behind sewing machines in those death traps
Pump out more and more stuff which fewer and fewer can afford to buy,
Or even need—or even can be induced to want
While we and every other company whips its managers at every level to cut costs
To beat the quarterly projections.
Do a little greenscamming if it sells, but for God’s sake why risk spending money
Cutting emissions or pollutions when the competition doesn’t.
Besides, just buying politicians and regulators who will
Cut those burdensome regulations
Is a so much better investment.
Keep ‘em scared of terrorism
At least plots foiled at the last minute that we can’t tell you about
Military and security high tech hardware is almost pure profit
And is made obsolete before it is out the door by the next thing they build
Billion dollar human flyswatters – and splat
Some radical wedding party in East Whocareswhereastan
Is hot mush—and so it pisses off the locals–
More targets, more drones to sell
And NSA, such a beautiful off-the-books customer, searches the twitter feeds
For all suspect patterns that link bombs or suicide to love to any critical word which correlates
With poetry, English major, and democracy—so that every mother’s son
Has a current threat number and a set of tracking coordinates
And the hard drives house gigabytes of blackmail material and credit card numbers to
Bring anyone around with one little visit—if they are even worth a visit,
Because who needs spies and informers
When they have a catalog of pretexts and detention facilities for any situation
If Fox and Rush and all the little Rushites don’t quite succeed in keeping
Their eyes off the ball.
Trust me. This shit works
And you need to fully understand that new weather, or climate, if you prefer, is a cornucopia of investment opportunities:
Arctic oil, Canadian forests cleared for soybeans,
Hell man, sure the storms and fires and droughts are impressive but we have great backup generators, great pumps, and besides
Climate change is just the kind of creative destruction
that makes capitalism keep ticking.
I mean, What’s not to like?
Conscience is for suckers.
Single malt scotch and a little blow
Cleans any still left in your system
Right out.
You will love it here.
WILL JUSTICE COME
Will Justice come
Like the Cheyenne and the Sioux
Rising as righteous blood-red sunbeams
Cresting the eastern bluffs
On Custer’s last morning?
Will Justice come
Like that final verdict
One grey dawn in Nuremberg
As fifty million dead watched
Knowing that no vengeance
Could ever balance
History’s scale?
Justice never repays the awful debt
In coin that can be spent.
It renders to the victims
Only the cold, wet morning
After the hurricane,
To find their dead;
To find themselves
To find that it is their turn again
To try to build their
Trembling house of cards
On those graves.