Intimations of the Next World

16.

"It's just the same old song,
But with a different meaning
Since you've been gone...."
(The Four Tops)

3 Pakistanis
dead in a racist killing
in Birmingham put
England on the map again,
its imperialist dreams

reduced to threats of
unleashing the army for
another bloodbath
a la Belfast--old news here
in Mexico where 50

thousand citizens
are collateral damage
and gringo agents
focus their artillery
from their new base in our north.

In Chile students
have been fighting in the streets
for 4 months against
neopinochetism,
demanding education

gratis instead of
the right to go into debt,
while stock markets crash
like demolition derbies
and NATO ups its bombing

of civilians
in Libya, where the fake
opposition paid
by NATO begin to shoot
each other, and China asks

for a more stable
currency than the dollar,
while another quake
rattles down the ruins of
Fukushima. On the Rez

near the toxic site
of Hanford, folks prepare for
an AA powwow,
while the ghost of Strontium
90 whistles in the sagebrush.