Three Antifa Poems to Get Me Through

Three Antifa Poems To Get Me Through

by John Kendall Hawkins

I.

In the fascist playgrounds of yesteryore
where fey made monsters held court
and fought turf wars for our twinkies,
our little packaged sugar shacks, our souls —
while their future wives snapped gum and smoked
at the same time — we were presented with the choice:
a prison life of shower room soap bars slipping, oops,
or a life of truancy and avoidance,
the fear of becoming an artist, hungry
for new spuckies of perception. The fascists
say, when we come to take you, like
at the end of a Pinter pause
where they sing happy birthday and then
blow all out all your fucking candles, please
have your God beside you as well we work
so that we can punk “Him” too.
And no, we don’t take mastercard.
You’ll just have to pay.

II.

The horse’s head
in that bloody bed
made me queasy
and I dare say uneasy —
an Offenbach symphony
you can’t refuse to listen to —
O, murder (I mean, omerta) is in play,
off-Broadway, I’d sell you tix
but then I’d have to kill you for kix,
bring your kids over for a picnic on Sunday,
after Mass, and the transub-
stantiation still digesting, making its way from
wine to blood, habeus corpus, and you
took no knee before the Lord of “Love,” no
Hail Marys after the confessional,
where the old priest gasped like a professional
and you said, wait til I tell you, father,
what I have on you, and he gasped again,
and you never did get forgiven, amen,
for that horse’s head on the bloody bed.

III.

At some point fidgeting in the bed you
made for yourself in time,
in the ghetto light of your mind,
monsters under will call out, boo!
Your apocalyptic horses fire scream
and the Judgements roll up their sleeves
some “God” pulls out your timeline leaves
and says, redeem the hour, o redeem.
Fuck it! You go battle under the bed
and find — boo! — a jungle of dust bunnies
and laid back ghosts wearing sunnies,
proving that fear can go to your head.
It’s not that you have never or never will sin;
but you owe nothing to “God,” the shape-shifting grin.

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.