Anyone willing to be corrected is on the pathway to life. Anyone refusing has lost his chance.-Proverbs 10:17
Here is provided a rare
opportunity, within the normally passive role of reader to impose one’s
personal tastes on a text, while simultaneously either affirming or disputing
the poet’s “buyer’s remorse” concerning the last option
that had gained some slight though decisive preferential edge over the other
participants in his ongoing internal deliberations. Just vote for your favorite
passage… mm-hm a little like the choose-your-own adventure book phenomenon
that exploded into nigh marginal popularity during the late eighties then, evidencing
the mysteriousness of the lord’s ways, ascended to the immortal plane
of colloquial idiom, where it assumed its place at the right hand of Max Headroom,
while in harmonious unity a choir of angels sang Everybody Wang Chung Tonight-
power, glory, ever and ever et cetera...
United States of Appleseed
Johnny’s appletrees blossom dissent.
Quietly gurgles discontent
from the mouth of Mighty Miss and all the way down her throat.
Mute tongues of flame, not bright enough to out-glow primetime,
flicker from a burning bush by the appletree, licking the foundation
beneath the Values family, eating dinner from tray-tables in their riverfront
home.
Ads numbly drum on and on,
while the reincarnation of god
re-arises to confront his killers, propped up on their fear.
Oil burns off slowly, producing thick greasy smoke
that leaves its residue on billboards along Wall St. and Penn. Ave.
In winter it blackens suburban snow.
“Bloom, blossom!” fulminates no dissenter.
No family declares, “Fire, fire!”
“Gurgle,” murmur no discontented masses.
They call, “God, fear!” and
“cough, cough,” they are answered.
“Guidance,” they pray.
Miss chokes on a millennium of philosophy,
discarded to make room for old bibles, new agendas, and fear.
Once flippant, atheists fear forgiveness.
Old agnostics fear what they no longer understand,
old issues explained in new terms
of civil-unilateralism, partial-birth pre-emption, marriage to principle and
sanctity of policy.
Thou shalt not eat the fruit of the tree of Johnny Appleseed,
for a gluttonous evangelical worm has burrowed a fearsome hole in it.
The appletree-trunk is burning.
Take up informed buckets! Form a line!
But don’t go down to the banks of ol’Miss.
Her waters are slick and pulpy with crude oil and drowning texts meant to better
mankind.
Back! Borrow Huckleberry’s raft! Through Appleseed History, press back
against the polluted current!
We must stroke back until we find some clear inlet or fresh well-spring.
Stroke faster! Johnny’s appletree blossoms fire, spreading through the
forest.
Two petroleum-birds fueled for trans-Atlantic flights
struck two tall trees in Johnny’s Big Apple-forest.
Their blood poured out and the world, invited, watched the puddle spread across
Great Lakes and
while the Bush kept right on burning- never burning- up but burning- down all around.
DC Smith- 11/04
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