CAN’T AS CAN’T CAN

You Can't
call a spade a spade
even if evoking the old trope
not the (relatively) recent
slur against black people
who "our" government and its
corporate sponsors
would "vanish" if they could.

You Can't
compare Zionism to Apartheid
much less Nazism
though you wonder if
"they would if they could,"
that is, devise a Final Solution
to that pesky Palestinian "problem."

You Can't
wonder how people can "support our troops"
when troops are pressured
by "our" military to re-enlist
after extended duty in an
extended murder of a people
who pose no threat to us at all
(and never did).

You can
write poems about
the abominable mentality
behind this barbarism, for
such mentalities don't read much poetry,
but if they did, you can be damn sure
that even someone like me,
harmless, bookish, little ol' me,
would be labeled "terrorist"
or "terrorist's accomplice"
for suggesting that
"freedom of speech" means "freedom to babble"
about common sense and common knowledge
and everything else false, deceitful, common.
and hostile to life, love, beauty and freedom.

You can also
laugh at the powerful few
the way they laugh
at the powerless many
for believing this government
of the powerful, by the poweful, for the powerful
cares more for the powerless "citizens"
of this "society" than for the
millions of powerless lives it
squanders for profit daily
in many, many lands across
this sick, shamed, exhausted globe.