Fear

Small town America awakens
to bright orange glows
on multiple horizons.
In the distance the wail of sirens
stunts morning activities;
dead televisions raise bilious anxiety.

Frantic citizens search
for pre-computer relics,
those old AM radios,
only to find oozing batteries
rendering them inoperable.

Cell phones click and dial;
interminable busy signals
and the fear begins to mount.
Crowds gather in the streets,
pointing and hypothesizing,
none know what happened
or what to do,
but all know their life has changed,
overnight...

No decision is easy
in a world of seven billion
when one always affects the many.
History is a cunning mistress,
one must invest deeply in time
and openmindedness to see
myriad patterns with clarity.

They say the winners write the books,
but what is a winner?
We blur broken lines with rhetoric,
talking points and five second clips,
expecting the masses to follow.
Sadly, most of them do,
so stuck in trials of personal security
we make decisions without knowledge.

We allow our leaders to govern
on faulty premises with no honor
and yet we are all guilty of the same
tired cliche, we get it honestly...
"Do as I say, not as I do".

And here we are, buried in politics,
the right leading with instilled fear,
the left terrorized by the right.

I ask you, are we not all brothers,
Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus,
and those of us that choose not to partake?
Do we not all share this shrinking world?
How difficult is it to get the American
public to actually educate themselves
globally for a few weeks or months?

I see the difficulty of a paradigm change,
fighting the propaganda machine
of "Conservative" America,
looking beyond news blurbs and hyperbole,
we flounder in a web of deceit.

Very few of us truly understand
the machinations of Congress,
why some bills must be turned down,
even though there may be good in them.
The system kills innovation,
trust and honor are rotted hulks,
lying dead below gold tinted spin.

The ramblings of this frustrated poet
can run lines and lines of words,
yet nobody really listens until
life comes up and kicks them hard.

Will it take being the hated by all others
to get us to finally learn the truth?
Will it be the fear of anhilation
by an enemy we can't see to drive
our vehicle of suicidal malevolence
to the depths of Armageddon?

I fear the morning of this prelude,
when those of us who foresaw the future
are run down and hunted as traitors,
when we all recognize that we let them
take control of our lives, our world,
one black day in late 2000.