I sat on my porch tonight and heard the frogs stirring in the last night,
saw the hawk give up her rounds in vain, head up to the trees over the hill.
Bombs are not the only thing that kill people, they just get the most attention.
On my porch I gave my pledge of allegiance to the new nation,
the Corporate Nation, and said my prayers.
I prayed for the people underwater, lured into their homes,
then chased out by the bankers still collecting their bonuses.
I prayed for the stolen holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas,
sacrificed to the mood of the stock market.
I prayed for the millions who have seen their work stolen and sent overseas,
and I pray to the new worker ants of the global economy here,
who scramble in giant warehouses to get us our two-day
free shipping, they can’t give those jobs away.
I pray for the farmers run off their farms, condemned by the economists as
too inefficient in the global economy, a capital crime, and run off their land,
I pray for their sons and daughters, driven to jobs they hate in distant cities.
And for the land, turned everywhere into black holes, bottom less pits,
garbage dumps.
I pray for the children who cannot imagine better lives than their parents had,
and for the people whose beaches and oceans have been stolen by developers building
the mansions that no one else will ever see.
And I pray to the old sheep, the humans distracted by their likes and notifications,
their tests and pills, pressured into ever longer lives and surgeries they can’t pay for, and then
blamed for not having the money to pay for it or for wealthy children to sacrifice themselves.
They are underwater too, pray hard for them.
I pray for the congress that protects us from people marrying freely, but
makes sure the angry and the disturbed can buy machine guns to shoot our children.
We don’t build monuments or statues any longer, but garbage dumps and strip
malls and we rape and insult the Mother Earth while our carbon seals the sky.
We abandon higher purpose or spiritual consciousness to a world driven by machines, our new
priests and rulers, our real representatives.
I care about you, but can no longer speak with you.
Please call customer service or leave a message. You mean a lot to us.
Brother, can you spare a “like” for peace? Or maybe declare war
on the rest of the world, they are not like us, they cannot be human.
Perhaps we can “share” what it is that people are really for? And “tweet”
a short prayer for Mother Earth, you can hear her weeping and see her tears from my porch.
Bombs are not the only way to kill people and steal their land and farms
and work. You can do it every day and never see blood,
or hear a siren, or get on TV, or arouse the wrath of a congressman, or
get chased through the streets by armies in black helmets,
pouring out of trucks.
On my porch, I pledge allegiance to the people underwater, whoever they are, wherever they are.
Your government is for sale. There are lots of ways to kill people.
The tub is overflowing.