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CounterPunch
Weekend
Edition
August 10, 2002
Coin of the Realm
a
lamentation
by Anthony Gancarski
I
You expected more
when I had nothing left
for trips to the mall to buy trinkets;
an hour's pay, a moment's thought and gone,
gone throughout the city.
These wailing, dead languages.
White people aren't willing to tell the truth
and mend those unplanned debts.
II
The virgin mother
We disappoint her when we ignore
stigmata as if it is offhand
We convict criminals
hang their black asses
for the sake of not admitting
that you cannot reach God
by dealing death at random
from spectral blips in the sky.
We cheer the lynchings
but we are the slaves
the servile house niggers
tapdancing in jackboots
and sometimes we feel each other up
and sometimes we sit and get high
cheering our oppressors
smart men, smart as bombs.
III
The setup, the scam
always the same thing:
they catch you unaware
of who they are.
Do not assume your owners
are good people.
They have priced your life,
appraised it at fair market
value and offered you half,
though you took a third in the end.
IV
Alone in a rusted Volvo
with swamp wafting from the vents.
You were trying to tell me
my future, to tell me
it was just the past reconfigured.
I would always fail, you said,
and I took you at your word.
But what's failure now?
Collapse and ruin,
and the thousand dollar couch
melts in the rain,
made of cardboard after all.
Money on loan from God,
but spent as if by thugs
so safe and free
in the home of the brave
where we cower when we smell
those awkward smells.
Where we're all tricked out
for slips of paper
a war on terror
a beatdown of a raghead.
Where we all expect
our letters to be read
by safety first or Mother May I
Where we are all bastards
and colonists,
we live in fear as if thieves.
V
We like the cars that go boom
and the bombs that chute
through airducts sportscar sleek.
We have made our beds
of the corpses of Laotians,
Somalians, Nicaraguans,
Nigerians; still the hordes
storm the pipelines with stones.
There will always be more.
We are thieves and bullies
just as our so-called heroes
these holograms of the hegemon
who have somehow become respectable
in this empire's dotage.
We are to cheer and act impressed,
supplicants yet safe and free.
Ready to kick terror's ass
when our scripts get filled.
VI
Sluggers never cry, ain't that right?
Even when they have lust in their hearts
they would never think to proclaim
who they love and why
as maybe it's too late.
Bulls running from the stench of death,
bullshit artists misreading texts
finding power and glory
in the force of a fist upside a head.
Visions shed and shucked
like husks of a quainter time.
Eviscerated specters in longing's dusk.
Morality and love and all the rest.
The beautiful girls, never held,
never told they're special
until the stocks collapse
and they're kidnapped and slashed.
In death, we all are saints.
But we aren't to live for ourselves
but for a flag or paper money.
All guilty or unproven,
left to the tenderness
of the master's jurisprudence,
knowing no one loves a slave.
VII
A weekend, a party:
some motel in Kalispell
or a hovel in Missoula.
We drink until it's gone
and we smoke until it's gone
and somehow fail to notice
it's been the same routine
for far too long.
As long as the bowl
makes its way around,
it will be fine.
Sometimes the wave breaks
and I am alone in my thoughts,
taken by a familiar scent
to a time gone by
when I was young and turned
somersaults on the lawn,
never thinking so much could be lost.
VIII
Men without honor toll the bells.
Bland men, sad men,
men who always smile on camera.
Men without honor take from us
and call it charity.
We have been taken in
for too long by the stylish suits
and the synthesized accents.
We have sexualized clones and thieves,
making peace with the specter
to stave off death itself.
Disasters from stock footage --
Amtrak wrecks, child rapes
Deceptions with body count potential:
a few thousand or a few million
bodies with their last breath drawn
in sacrifice to freedom
to drill or to kill.
Mothers, shed your sons.
Anthony Gancarski is the author of Unfortunate Incidents,
a collection of poems and stories published in 2001. A student
at Gonzaga Law School, he can be reached at anthony.gancarski@attbi.com
.
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August 10/11,
2002
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
August 9,
2002
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