Matt Cooper
Guest Poet
Lucretius said nothing
In the Nature of Things
About the bullets that would
Make my friends disappear
Like the oceans that used
To Roll over the flat,
Dormant plains here.
The Orwellian history of now,
The Comets, Corrosion,
The Cultural eutrophication
And police officers murdering
The sick, the elderly mad men
and the Poor, have rotted
This land through the years
While automatic weapons
Filled the supermarkets
And children lost their tiny Minds
To the whirling rusty Storms
That are manufactured
In the soot filled skies
Which are only indigo
By Illusion.
Though, I find myself unafraid
Of spring twisters, flash floods,
Droughts, grain famine and the
Genocide of bees in comparison to
The legalities of carbine rifles and
.50 caliber munition rounds
Constructed for the purposes
Of wars and mass fratricide.
(For what are we but a genus
Of siblings fighting over the
Definition of God?)
That the rot minded child
In stunted growth may barter
For 357 magnums with hair triggers,
That a manic depressive might trade
A few crinkled twenties
For an army surplus hand grenade
Used by a now dead soldier
Who served in Khafi ‘91.
That the monsignor could spend
The collection plate donations
On a pump action shotgun and
Wipe out the choir boys at the
Church of the Magdalene for
Refusing to recite hail maries,
These things are why Heraclitus
Might have gotten it right:
Perhaps all the basic elements of life,
Earth, the cosmos and the psyche have
Derived themselves
From fire.