OnPoEvMo: Bush 2.0 January 2007

There has been a flurry of poems this month with my OnePoemEveryMonth project and I can barely keep up with the words (that’s a good thing until I lose some of the words in the time when I am not near a pen, paper or computer). Here is a poem I wrote after watching part of the State of the Union address (without sound).

Bush 2.0: State of the Union 2007 (January 2007)

Listen to the poem

The sound was turned off but not the screen
and I just wished I could turn him off, too,
but I couldn’t find the remote to the rhetoric
and anyway, my access was limited,
so I glued my eyes to his face
and wished for some miracle of metamorphosis on the podium
that never came
and marveled at the way his expression twitched and turned
and there was tension behind that presidential mask.
At least, there was that — the tension of the times.

On this stage, the new is the old
and the old is nothing more than
the origami of truth and facts twisted
and reformatted into convenience for the sake of simplicity
and I’m left feeling like a little child in the time-out corner of the nation,
not at all clear what I am doing here
and unable to claim responsibility.

All I want is openness.
All I get is incompetence
in this last gasp of a man
looking into the inkwell of historians
and seeing only the red ink of error after error
written permanently in the blood of our soldier-citizens.
Friends — family — farewell.

Click.

Peace (in peaceful times),
Kevin