Silver buttons, golden boughs, ornately jeweled fingers.
Adorning ditches alongside random tires and used syringes.
So much depends upon a little red gully
Filled with muddy, bloody, rain-water.
The demagogue was not a demigod after all.
Dictatorship turned out not to be so much fun after all.
And after all, after all the joy of wanton cruelty faded
Survivors just got jaded and all the joy faded.
After all the promises unkept and all the lies exposed,
After all the hypocrisy grew like hairy poison vines
And after all the trees were felled, life itself rebelled.
After all the hate replaced each and every seed and every need.
It wasn’t so much fun after all. Not to die nor even to bleed.
They shoot horses don’t they?
Yes —
Buttheyshootdogsandcats and anythingtheycan.
Food is scarce, for sure.
But it isn’t just for food.
It used to be for fun.
But now it’s just another humdrum way to fight boredom
Laced with randomness and ruin and rum.
Even the scab-faced Bannonites.
And the golden calves of sanctimonium,
Radioactive to the core,
As is the mango pit they still adore,
Even they who wanted check and slay,
All are nothing more than shadows on the dead and empty warscape.
Killing off the ecosphere had all the “inconvenience” of a rape.
This was the summer of our discontent.
Too hot to live, the grid had nothing more to give.
Lack of AC proved a prize for everyone!
Not just those too poor. Surprise!
The greed, after all, charged its own lightning fast steed
Of the apocalypse.
After all the trials and after all the errors,
After all the pilgrims and their progress.
After all the pillage and the patriots
No-one was saved, after all.
There was only the infinite regress —
Not to the mythical fifties,
Not to flags Confederate,
Not to ages medieval
Nor even to Empires Latinate
After all, after all the shattered dreams of millions,
Just aching to be free,
We let it all slip away;
Pretending not to know our history,
Pretending that there is no devil to pay
When we cheat each other day after day after day after day.
It doesn’t make anything great, after all.
It doesn’t make anything better, after all.
Being a baby that fusses and musses
Isn’t so wise after all
When there are no adults left to clean up the messes.
After all the pain.
After all the suffering.
After all the self-imposed blindness.
All we really thirst for
Is a little human kindness.
So we search inside the bombed out marts.
We search beside the broken body parts.
We search beneath the fallen walls.
We search abandoned shopping malls.
What we find, after all,
Is what we should have seen before it all.
We have nothing but each other.
So why would we kill a brother after all?
After all,
A Civil War
Is not so civil…
After all.
How the Nightingale Learned to Sing
The only them that counts is all of us
petersironwood 