CONFESSION ZERO (The Weaver's Song)

What if war were just a chaotic dress rehearsal in a school play
and torture were long philosophical conversations with idiots,
bullets, tiny bits of lint culled from laughing soldier's uniforms,
fighter jets, kites dropping from the shoulders of the sun,
warships, marshmallows floating in a sea of hot chocolate,
and tanks, funny little cars full of tumbling clowns?

O! If only it were so then all of the world's hideous warmongers might be
paper dolls in rooms full of beautiful children, each with a pair of scissors...

...when I think of the soldiers packing gear, their guns silent, tanks still, standing at the ready, eyes moist with liberation and grief, hands wrung their last, I think of them gleaming, striding away from the savagery, the dying, the defeated, the triumphant... colorless stench.

When I see them marching out, freed of the difficult sand, I imagine that black soldiers are most anxious for home, valling for the stretch of time to witness their history, onlooker to human hope instead of war’s gangling limbs stacked like firewood on streets smothered in suffering.

When I think of all of the soldiers coming home shipped in those god-awful frowning boxes, I try to imagine their loved and beautiful faces, but their smiles float away from who they were. What a sad and ghastly testament of their use.

Dear Poet,
May your use, your words paint upon this, grant us reprieve from an unfavorable history. Free our hearts and our minds of horrid combat, for war is the chain that has enslaved us all.

Arabs hail shoe-hurling journalist
As time bends the body down, war, torture, agony and lies do erect the mind in rage. O! Had he the strength to hurl the millions of bones.

Supreme Court orders review of Guantanamo torture case
What of this dismal occasion is left to unearth, what of it do we not already know? Their echoes of anguish grown of our stillness like flag draped caskets floating home. The misery chambers long quiet, save for the lasting pleas of vengeance.

Israel frees hundreds of Palestinian prisoners
A bird of prey was meant to fly. Move about like dreams. Soar like a mighty dragon. They were not meant to be caged! (Where’s the sport in that?)