Candle wax dripping warm

into soft sculptured

operating room wounds.

No anesthetic.

No antibiotics.

No food.

No memory.

 

 

Just driving your children

to the Emergency Room

to die one after the other

from strange

quiet glowing diseases.

 

But I am a reasonable man.

I know there are two sides to every tale.

So when I read the stories of darkness

in the Land of War

I know.

 

It is a place where a man would not have to worry

about things like property taxes,

divorce.

or office politics.

 

Just imagine

a quiet neighborhood in northern Ohio,

with orange flames,

falling across the lawns,

while the neighbor's houses leap block to block

and the children run

diapers hanging to their ankles

creeping soft pads across the streets of

melting asphalt.

 

 

I read of babies born with strange limbs,

or children carrying cancers

which cannot be treated by sanctions

as they kneel in the dirt

trying to dig their fathers from soft graves

 

Fragments of radioactive ordinance

occupying shelves,

caught between teddy bears

and fluffy caricatures of

Big

Bird.

 

See a country traumatized

as we force a useless will

against a land that can no longer make clean water.

And we have promised

a life of reason to all children of the world

with the exception of these.

 

All of us reasonable

and intelligent men

bound

to see whether the madder hatter

is the one who hides behind his children

or the one who guns them down

out of mind

out of bizarre, inexplicable fright.

 

And I wonder what consequences

we will nurture with this one.

Whether consequence is a word without meaning

or a deep steaming wound that has forgotten reason,

 

A terrible pain,

another caustic incurable sore

that will knaw us for generations.

 

But I am a reasonable man.

And there are two sides to every story.