Evangeline

We watch from barred windows
In the halls of the free
We gasp at the antics
Of the men in the tree

We live in a time
When the world can be run
By a number of maxims
From the book of the gun

They stand in the light
From the activist’s glory
Now he’s long dead
They own the rights to his story

Break open those windows
Let scepticism breathe freely
Watch for the traps
That lurk in the TV

In homeland security
or gross national pride
with torture and murder
racism and lies

with rape and with plunder
they leave us our fate
to scrabble from under
the empire’s dead weight

And although it be treason
For us to remember
The historical reasons
For the eleventh of September

The reasons remain
For no action was taken
To address the root causes
or pacify the Kraken

now the plains they are strewn
with the corpses of children
yet Evangeline loiters
With bullets and with napalm

Her head has been emptied
Of all of the reasons
that lubricate the wheels
that destroy all the seasons

and the killers they lurk
in halls of corruption
their hair turning grey
as the worms feed inside them

So watch from barred windows
In the halls of the tree
But save them a cell
For their fall from the free


April 2006

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