Intimations of the Next World

14.

"If they move, kill 'em!"
Pike Bishop (William Holden) in "The Wild Bunch"

A Norwegian self-
appointed messiah guns
down 93 of
his fellow whites to protest
their government's policy

of inclusiveness,
sure he is saving the world
from Islamism.
Who sold him the gun, pointed
him towards The Enemy,

gave him the concept
of Manifest Destiny?
I think it was you:
you, with your old wrathful god
crounched on your shoulder like a

cancerous jackal;
you, whom he ordered to bring
death in the names of
civilization, freedom,
the technology of time,

have brought history
to the pit of extinction,
and sold the future
for the price of a wristwatch.
Ice melting in the Arctic

releases toxins
that stop the fish in their flow;
Inuits have more
than 100 names for snow,
while we need only one for

nuclear winter,
and collateral damage
rolls off our tongues like
marbles. By naming things we
believe we have controlled them--

or by killing them.
At daybreak, Coyote is
winding up his hunt
through Chaco Canyon, taking
the words right out of our mouths.