poem

Do you think you can check out
Like at wal-mart
Turnoff and tune out
Like your big screen

Do you think you won’t hear
The screams of the
Guatemalan peasants
Of the murdered Cuban literacy workers
If you turn up your ipod

Do you think you can buy
Your way into nirvana so you can forget
The Afghan children who are daily burnt alive
The starving toiling masses who you squash with tanks
Every day every day every day every day every day every day


You can’t
Because they haunt your sleep
Your fiendish dreams are full of ghosts
Your trips to the mall are death marches
You can hear them in the spaces between breaths
You can see their twisted bloody bodies
Out the corner of your eye
Your stupid fashion cannot cover it
Your fancy perfume cannot mask the stench of their
Bloated corpses
And in the end
They will come in lock step
To claim what is theirs and there will be nothing left
For you.