Love and those of us who like fucking love peace;

and I, for my part, am happy enough with a favor

won in a virtual spat from a chatroom dominatrix.

I’ve not got one thousand nodding donkeys

pumping crude from the fat of the land in East Texas;

I’m not interested in snapping up Liz Taylor’s

cast-off diamond necklaces; and you won’t find me

done up like a ponce in Armani or Pierre Cardin.

But that is not to say that I am ready to slap on a flak-jacket

and go kick the ass off the axis of evil for the good of good old Uncle Sam.

Some foreign egg-head’s at the back of all the ills in the world,

I know. But he’ll end up with 2,000 volts, courtesy of

Enron and the Federal government, thumping through his liver

on a prison hospital bed one day for sure. So, I don’t care.

What are brains worth when they’re fried, mister? The only way

is the righteousness of the born-again dumb-assed soul. God bless!

*

Now, the anchor with the blond bob and the tits on CBS

says it’s getting rough in the sandstorms out there

but we’ve got the bastards on the run, of course,

and superiority in the air and technological stealth

and smart bombs and sensitivity to collateral damage

and depleted-Uranium-tipped tomahawks

and an overwhelming sense of right will always prevail.

But I say, after a beer or three, on the sofa

that you can have or have yourself a gilded bathtap

from a Presidential palace in Baghdad,

but you can’t take it with you, can you,

if you end up some skeleton in uniform

with your bare dumb ass sticking out of a dune.

The bones and the stinking sun-dried flesh

of homeboys and aspirant blue-eyed all-American superheroes

get ground up all the same by the eroding desert winds and mixed

with those of the Fedayeen.

Howard Hughes, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn and JFK

wind up in the same sorry shipwrecked boat

as the rest of us, once they’re dead.

That’s why I prefer heavy metal music

and working out my adrenalin in the crush

of a Kiss concert and, while I’m still young,

dedicating myself to Stolichnaya and Peter Stuyvesant

and long-necked Buds and long hair

and head-banging and amphetamines

and a fuck for the groupies who didn’t get lucky that night.

Till I’m too old and bald for that sort of thing.

Then I’ll mellow out and enrol

on a night-school course as a mature student

and study astronomy, and weather science or law.

Because I’ve always wondered why the moon

rises and falls and grows fat or thin by the month,

and how we used gravity to visit it

and why twisters come from time to time

to trash trailer homes and why there is always clouds and rain

over our holy land and why God paints a rainbow

through the sky when sun shines through purple haze

and why the tops of the pines sigh and shake in the wind

in National Parks and why, lying stoned on your back

all night on Summer Camp, the Plough goes round and round

the Northern Star and never dips into the lake and why the Seven Sisters

stick so shiningly and close together like Motown sistas

and why the sea doesn’t fly off into space

like an Apollo rocket

and why seasons and moods come and go.

And in Church I’ll learn of the hell

Where whores are broken on wheels,

and evil Nazi doctors are chained to crags

and operated on, without anesthesia,

and the unfairly wealthy are forced

to endure an eternal thirst

to the sound of Evian water dripping out of reach;

and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

are constantly a-sowing a pandemic of AIDs, rattle-snake bites,

bipolar disorders, anorexia, smoking, obesity and diabetes

over that shady, inescapable place

guarded by Rottweilers and sharks.

But I’ll know, because by then I will be an educated person

and wise through age, that all of this is merely a necessary

illusion for the dim-witted and the blessed,

who, of course, can’t handle the grim reality of cremation,

oblivion and death.

When I die what will remain of me

will be simply this simple life that I have led, am leading

and will lead.

And I leave it you who

like crew-cuts and guns and the stars and stripes

close to your breast

to do the very worthy job of National Defense.