Dichotomy
There! is where politicians claim to protect the world & we protect their hyperbole, as we hastily build fences to secure it in the shifting, whispering, sand,
Where there were imaginary beaches with real beachheads and the superheated desert shoved into backache-sized sandbags,
Where phone calls home were truly priceless, really, check the phone bills,
Where those who could think could not afford to, and those who never could think were placed in charge,
Where we destroyed all places sacred and taboo, and the local man and woman were just “rag heads,” as dubbed by the omniscient Sarge,
Where we had to steal seats for our HUMVEE to go on hasty missions, and we had no armor driving into urban hell, no safety gear for me, but a 9mm noisemaker against the barbarian swell,
Where no such swell existed before, but for Bush's yellow-cake spell,
Where there were Expeditions launched with heavy armor, but they also had leather seats and built-in air-conditioning,
Where the bigwigs - those with the stars, weren’t they all just charmers, lining up impatiently to kiss the Rummy ring,
Where cages gleefully held the manufactured brown devil while letting the real White Old One’s standby and gloat, with claims of coming to this land of two rivers as Saviors,
Of course, They raped the poor brown man: laughing as they took turns, violently shoving White freedom down the "rag-head" throat,
Where even if They got trapped playing paradoxical games where the winner lost and the loser won, the poor onlooker paid the cost, whether he died or lived, unnamed, beaten, tortured, naked scum,
Where the only things to be found hanging in the gardens of Babylon were poverty, hopelessness, and fear,
Where there may have been alcohol in bars only to have bars on alcohol, and the 14th July bridge, a deathtrap leading to the cowardly Green Zone,
Where there never was any liberty, within the cage or without,
Where there were so many civilians without civility,
Where there was so much intelligence without any,
Where there was brazen reporting of assumptions,
that even Fox News blushed Red, White, and Blue,
Where dragged into yet another White man’s war,
we brown and black men and women paid with our souls
