White Stars on a blue field 2/05

White Stars on a blue field 2/05 tom odegard
(long ago blood was the strenght of the physical body)

under tech no_logic discoveries
seeming inconsequential consequences build...
what are these recurring nightmares?
uncountable historic repetitions
of tell tale blood drained away?
white stripes punctuated by
fresh red bandages waving in the breeze,
morbid reminders of our war dead?
survivors of undeclared actions
with blown apart bodies, limbs, and shrapnelled minds?

Do these wind driven cloths underwrite our loss
and promise utopian futures
even as we fly them
to justify another war?

Our children's blood wastes away...

Anticipating Armageddon some folk
queue up for Christ's promised paradise
raptured into perfect bodies: special salvations,
immortal lives for the chosen.
Woe unto the unbelievers
whose children's blood wastes away
in prophetic cities of sand...

Are we sane, sapient, and upholders of compassion?
I'd recommend pharmaceutical mood_alters
promising a kinder present save for adverse
side effects: parenticide, murder, psychotic catastrophes.
The blood drains out of the living stars floating on a blue field
dead zone purities: What ARE WE seeking?

What want lies feverish in our flag struck eyes?
Want as in salivations, gastro-intestinal clenchings,
tetanies and thinglings in skin, muscle, tendon, bone,
textures, carresses, cremasteric reflexes...
satiated and renewed thru mindless sex, meals,
piecemeals, dangerous chemicals, instant gratification,
acquisitions filling up our lives with unlikely possibilities.
Everywhere, 80,000 daily compounds alchemically turn
gold into lead outside our cognizance: changing us in small steps,
providing illusions to comfort us with momentary pips of joy.

Oh yes, these satiations stuff us full beyond doing,
we are become the dragons of legend
guarding our treasures,
imprisoning our chiledren in towers of desire,
seeking holloweyed relief
from personal want...
so our blood drains away
covering us with a red and white striped shroud

What was our true unjaded desire?
Our formative want still hiding in our secret self?
That particular wish the obverse of which
crushes our utopian hope
in this endless holocaust of war?
blood wastes away

Earth's oceans die
her waves break higher upon the cliffs
roll farther inland on the Atlantic shore
while volcanoes grumble and
tectonic plates heave or grind.
What do these flags shredded by rising winds proclaim?
Where the remnants of our lost children,
our lost focus, our unacknowledged hope?

Close up we see ourselves: mute
transparent, our blood drained away.