Through this time so sorrowfully past
We dropped countless explosions, flesh-blossomed,
So clever pushing the brainly-designed pods
And now comes far more tomorrowed smart bombs.
Oh, this endless scientific avarice,
To discover again our ghoulish genius,
We who launched a million ships
Since golden Ilium burned with Greek fire
Through the time so sorrowfully past
And dropped countless explosions, flesh-blossomed
Lightning the sky like Zeus in a righteous rage.
Shrewd cunning slithers through our high-tech success,
Swallowed until our gorged stomachs implode
Through the time so sorrowfully past
Like the golden apple thrown to the Three
And dropped countless explosions, flesh-blossomed,
Slashing the moral sky like Gorgoned hubris,
Leaving Sophia cut up like the Levite's concubine
Through the time so sorrowfully past
In this vast historical ever forgetting,
Thundering the sky like fallen messengers
Where we squander mind blossoms in this
Moral smart-aleck Hell of tomorrow.
The HD TV vivid
lies
skulled face up
in the dark hut in Darfur,
the swaddled soil of a child
and her jointed, bamboo-sticked arms
on the mud floor
her bloated stomach
a greedy balloon of air e x p a n d i n g, r i s i n g
toward the (mean 'wile') civilized world—
The latter politicians
plane
over
their lush land escapes
to their surfeited thoughts of juicy sirloin and a cocktail
of their problems galore. They fixate
flustering,
buffeted by the windstorm
in their nostril;
I-doctoring their digital Iris
they sleuth for each speck, each jot and tittle...
Titillation.
They worry over the tempest
in their shot glass;
yet their future is the parched abyss,
the hungering earth.
After we drove
down,
through
falling
snow,
down
a ranch road into pasture
by the frozen stream,
I sat in the truck cab looking...
falling
splotch-starred darkness,
through the cracked, pitted windshield,
while the ranch cook grimaced and cursed.
He jumped from the driver's seat,
stomped
back to the pickup bed,
shot the pensive dog,
and dumped him
into a snow bank
—for vultures and the rot of spring.
And, me, sitting in the cab,
feeling like Lenny.
Daniel Wilcox's wandering lines have appeared in many magazines. Before that he hiked through California State University Long Beach (Creative Writing), Montana, Pennsylvania, Europe, Palestine/Israel...worked in a mental institution, and taught students literature. He lives with his wife on the central coast of California. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" was previously published in The Medulla Review. "Mean 'Wile'" was previously published in Frame Lines.