Well Bottom Blues

Once we were inured to horror

by the smallness of our televisions,

war a crackling black and white

firefight a world away,

until the cartoon television generation

became their own Justice League

and rose up singing, Love, children

it’s just a kiss away it’s just a kiss away.

They kept the cameras out next time,

while feeding a stream of black and green

video game, the flash of a blast

without sound or visible victims.

War kept at arm’s length.

Oriental terrorists 

excused any vengeance

we unleashed upon them.

War they learned is a fragile thing

best kept swaddled in familiar lies.

Holy democracy is what and where

they say it is. Forget the camps and pogroms

this time because it’s just the wogs.

No price too high for others to pay

to extend our European enlightenment

without regard for the ungrateful natives.

We lost Vietnam in 1968

when the children’s gathered chanting

“the whole world is watching.”

They did not learn from Intifada

or Arab Spring or Ferguson or

BLM the weapon DARPA

unleashed is the one that might finally

bring about the end of war.

The necessary lies quickly unravel

when held up to mass public scrutiny,

a terrorist roster just a calendar.

Fifty years later pictures

of burning children come back to haunt us.

They cannot stop the horror flowing

without crashing Amazon, the pinnacle

of our enlightenment experiment.

The whole world is watching.

The whole world is watching.