The Field of Mars

Too many marches and formations, lectures on conditions
that will caramelize blood sugar, and then the afternoon
calculating the tare weight of such children as we have left.
I am desolate for a time when one could make a flaccid proverb
the basis of a love song, and you're somewhere deep underground,
working on a medical miracle to use as the next great weapon.
I beg you to put on some speed. The sooner you emerge,
the faster we'll achieve those countries we invented
an avoidance speech to whisper about on the Field of Mars,
the ones whose flags are nautical flags, and then we'll show them
once and for all the redundancy of liquidating intellectuals and refugees.
This is my bedtime story, in which we love the tyrant, who no longer
demands straw into gold or a rope twisted out of fresh ash.
In which we flip our hotelled properties to pay the exit fare.
In which I am begging God never to let me be poor again.

Tweet

Copyright © 2011 Benjamin Paloff All rights reserved
from The Politics
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission