The Arc Of Capitalism Turns Toward Annihilation

I’ll Take Your Answers In The Fossil Records

I originally began this poem during Hammering Hank Kissinger’s Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, which he hoped would leave the North back in the Stone Age and him with a Nobel Peace Prize.

I finished it during Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982. I might as well have waited until the Israelis began their systematic extermination of all Palestinians in Gaza.

What You Have Done

Beyond the city the city ruins
Not even a researcher enters
Where lizards still adjust themselves to the sun
Where rain is not welcome
Strangers wave only at mounds in the garden
Where nothing grows and whose fence
Can only be supposed
I walk here preparing to make up a name
Should someone ask I will point to my mouth
Shaking my head as I look to the ground
Where the bones speak softly
And their dusts dance for us
Their splintered calculi grin
Like grim cartoons we are too proud
To give our teeth to
When questioned I must maintain
I have no purpose