BUSH WATCH...POEMS

Nine Weeks

Nine weeks after the burial
We were led into this hall of horrors -
Ace of spades, balling the jack
sayin' "so who are we honouring here?"

  Have you ever studied obsidian?
Really looked into that shiney darkness?
It was kind of like striking the mother lode-
The mother was cold as dry ice...

.....     But hey, we are the lonely ones...
     .....and hey, we gave our only sons
     .....To your madness - sanctified or bogus -
     .....And the lie that has been so well sold to us...

  How do you explain "Missing movement"?
What's so hard about knowing the future
When destruction is called improvement?
Why can't healing precede the wound?

  We were never allowed to discuss it...
That would not be the modern American way!
But man, this is serious, you've stolen my partner -
And now you expect me to blindly obey?

       .....Mister, WE are the Only ones...
     .....listen, we gave our husbands and sons
     .....To your madness -sanctified and odious,
     .....To the lie-that has been so well sold to us...

  Hey, WE are America,
so why are we cowering?
Why have we sold our soul so cheap to this boy who would be King? Hey, remember America?
that glorious, cacophanous song of unity?
Before the lie of war consumed our days...
Before the 1980-onward haze...
Before this sad, new, toxic, sick malaise set in...

Yeah, we got time, but our time is wearing thin.

--posted August 17, 2005
copyright 2005 Ron Chistian Welch

Here He Is

"Here he is."
Well, here he is, neatly
packaged in his small
box, ready for the Xmas
market, the all-new
George W. Bush talking
action figure. Really.
If you don't believe me,
check it out online.
He has two costumes, his grey business suit with its bright red tie
and his fighter pilot
flight suit. When you push his button he has
some nice patriotic
words for your children
to remember. Maybe
George could play with Ken and Barbie. He could
send Ken off to his war,
and hump Barbie while Ken is gone. He could drive Barbie's pink car
and swim in her pool with
her friends. He could take off in a fighter plane and land it on the
deck of a US aircraft carrier. He could climb down from
the fighter plane and say
"Mission Accomplished."

--Peter Clothier, posted 12.08.04

Author of 2 books of poems, 2 novels, a memoir, and a monograph on the artist David Hockney, Peter Clothier writes and edits The Bush Diaries.

Yes, Bush

Yes, Bush, I am deeply
sickened by those images
now emanating from
your conquered Falluja:
the torture cells, the blood-
spattered walls, that black
mask like those we saw
worn by those terrible
assassins, standing indifferent
with automatic weapons
behind their victims. Yet
I confess I would be more
deeply disturbed had I not
seen those images emanating
from your Abu Ghraib:
the bleak, feces-covered
cells, the naked prisoners
subjected to sexual mockery
and piled in pyramids for
the pleasure of the guards
with their leering grins
and their victory signs.
So are there degrees
of inhumanity, I must ask
myself? I suppose perhaps
there are: still and all,
I find it hard to summon
much in the way of self-
righteous indignation, given
the crimes we have committed,
you and I, Bush, in the name
of freedom. I do not wish
to seem unduly sarcastic
or facetious, and yet I feel
compelled to ask, How do you
square this, Bush, with the one
you claim as your personal
savior Jesus, when you pray
to him? Because I remember
we tortured and killed him,
too, didn't we, gruesomely,
and with maximum cruelty?

--Peter Clothier, posted 11.29.04

Author of 2 books of poems, 2 novels, a memoir, and a monograph on the artist David Hockney, Peter Clothier writes and edits The Bush Diaries.

D.C.

I.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over Arlington Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed past Lincoln and down Constitution Avenue,
To where the Capitol guards kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying,

"Congressman!
You who weren't with us in the deserts of Iraq.
That corpse you planted last year in your Georgetown garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"

II.

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me,' he spoke.

'Answer me, Congressman. Why do you never answer? Answer.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

"I think this Mall is rats' alley,' he answered,
'Where the dead men lost their bones.'

'What is that noise?' I asked.

'The wind under the White House door.'

'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?' I asked.

'Nothing again, nothing,' the Congressman answered.

'Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?' I asked.

"I remember those are pearls that were the soldier's eyes.

'Are you alive, or not, Congressman? Is there nothing in your head?
Do something.'

'What shall I do? What shall we all do?
Shall I rush out as I am, and walk down
Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House?'

'Yes, Congressman, Yes.
Do not ask, what is it,
Let us go and make our visit.'

III.

THE Chair Bush sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden American Eagle peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the memorabilia cabinets,
Filled with worn balls, pennants, photos, uniforms,
In satin cases poured in rich profusion;
While vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked his strange synthetic industrial perfumes,
And drowned the sense in foul odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window high above, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke upward,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge desert-wood fed with copper
Burned beige and burnt orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carved stallion reared.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the desert scene
The change of cavalry, by a barbarous leader
And other withered stumps of violent U.S. history
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Our footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, Bush, his hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
Over and over, Bush pronounced
The emblem of his reign:

'get'em got'em get'em get 'em got 'em
get'em got'em get'em get 'em got 'em
get'em got'em get'em get 'em got 'em...'

We took our leave
In the face of
Such madness.

IV.

There was no water in that room, but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy desert
The desert winding among the mountains of neglect
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water in that room we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and our feet on the stair were in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead desert mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
In that room one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in that desert
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There was not even solitude in that room
But red sullen faces sneered and snarled
From doors of mudcracked minds
If there were the sound of water only
Sound of water over a rock
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there was no water

V.

THE Potomic's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The Noble are departed.
The river bears empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
And other testimony of summer nights. Truth-tellers are departed.
The long-gone heirs of city fathers,
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of the Potomic I sat down and wept...
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near,
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the congressional gashouse
Musing upon our country's wreck
And on the kings, our fathers' deaths.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sounds of long, black limousines hurrying near.

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la dome!

VI.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this land of dying stars
In this hollow valley of D.C.
This broken jaw of our lost kingdom.

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

VII.

Here we go round the prickly bush
Prickly bush prickly bush
Here we go round the prickly bush
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow of greedy, vain men

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow of power-hungry, blind men

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow of stupid, little men

This is the way our world ends
This is the way our world ends
This is the way our world ends
Not 'round a bang but a bush.

--from selected poems by T.S. Eliot, with changes by Politex, 02.09.04

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