O Say Can You Hear?

O Say Can You Hear?"

by Stephen Oliver

The dripping Gorgon's head
over the sands of Iraq,
spittle of snakes flame out

from a thousand gun barrels -

at last! the two worlds unite
in the death struggle,
the two as one to make a third:
fantasy is reality is fantasy.

America has become
its own horror cartoon,
each thought locked within
its renegade cell,

Bugs Bunny holds forth in
the senate on the bankrupt
dream-stocks buried at Fort Knox.

Donald Duck meantime jerks off
in disgust over the American flag -
quacks the country's been bushwacked,

'ain't worth a hill of beans'

in archaic colloquialisms of
a nation near claim jumping
the Middle East.

The last capitalist gasp vs
the last medieval groan;
eventually, to make way for
the eco-terrorists whose

motto: destroy what you cannot save:
will sound the retreat to a history
vaporised - a memory erased.

So we come to inherit 'Our Common Loss'.

The Space Shuttle Columbia makes
its long wave 'good-bye'

bright finger nails tearing at the sky
(like)

'morning Lucifer,
that star that beckons all
mankind to daily rounds'

scratching down God's blackboard
as seven souls fly away
toward the Pleiades.

So we make our omens
to live and die by.


Posted over on Identity Theory