Rose, Swastika, Bomb

You repeat to me
and everyone else who can hear
that poetry will save the world,
poetry is the full expression of love,
poets are the unelected legislators,
men die from not having the news from poems,
and so on, and so on…
and so on.

Are you serious?
Can you hear yourselves?

Can you hear yourselves
over the sound of the Sharpie
scrawling lines from a jihadist poem
onto the stock
of an AK-47?

Over the loudspeakers broadcasting
“The Eurhythmics Of Ancient Poetry”
to a mass of Chinese schoolchildren
synchronizing their calisthenics
to pre-approved poems
while bureaucrats nod?

Over the grinding
of three chords and hate
as the skinhead misspells his vitriol
in a screed on a screen devoted
to race war?

Over the screech
of a doggerel verse about
the President and his birthplace?

Over death-eyed rhymes of bling
and Glock and casual idolized
gangster dreams?

Can you hear yourselves?
Can you hear yourselves
over commerce forced-pentameter
and the sound of ideals clinking against
sonnets run foul with coin?

How do you understand, how do you explain away
poetry brought to bear on behalf of evil
and venal, in service to war and pain,
built to enflame blood
and rattle down weak walls
in time with the rounds from the guns?
Not every poem springs from love.
Not every poet is a snowflake,
unique and perfect; some write to honor
viler climates, but everyone’s
a poet too.  We forget

that men die every day
from bullets and lack of bread;

women die every day
from bayonet rape and circumcision;

children die every day
from starvation and public policy,

and among the killers
there are certainly poets
as possessed by this urge to write
as any of us who see windows
where they see walls,
and gates
where they see razor wire.

No telling what a poet
keeps in the pocket
next to the pen —

a rose,
a swastika,
or a bomb.