A Clockwork Phoenix Epiphany

(From the Terza Rima epic-in-progress: "The Triumph of Strife")

A poet woke midway in his life’s course
Another sat beside a public way
But this epiphany comes as remorse

That our lost war should rise another day
A clockwork timing, Phoenix irony,
With villages destroyed and left to lay

In their salvation’s ashes; newly free
To resurrect themselves in civil strife;
To stay and die or else to live and flee:

Westmoreland’s choice to those who “value life”
Less than we value ours while taking theirs
Producing metronome statistics rife

With missing counts of bodies as our wares
We sell again our sullied, soiled affairs

Yet unlike poets such as those above
We have no Roman or Romantic guide
We move commanded now by lash not love

As mad Macbeth sits nursing wounded pride
And Birnam’s trees converge on Dunsinane
The witches’ prophecies no longer hide

Their glaring flaws once seemingly inane
Those honest trifles with which trust was won
Betray in deepest consequence germane

We feel ourselves again by us undone
By our own fearful blindness held in pawn
Not long ago we watched this setting sun

Through windows over which some shade was drawn;
And in the twilight’s gloom we saw the dawn

Yet long night’s tunnel lay ahead for years
With no light at the end as often spied
By those who spoke of hope but offered tears

To cover for the fact that they had lied
And squandered blood and money on a bet
That they could win some thing unspecified

Their ever-promised victory: “Not yet!”
“These things take time,” they say, to stall for more
Perhaps until some greater fool unmet

Arrives upon the tilted trading floor
And bids up prices further on a loan
So they can sidle sideways out the door

With cash in hand for selling off a moan
That leaves the kids indebted to a groan

We know this song; we’ve heard its tune before
The lying lyrics so familiar are
A rapping rhythm rotten to the core

A withered wish upon a falling star
A dim demented dirge of deathly porn
A sordid saga for a glib guitar

That steals the future long before it’s born
That grabs at now before some later comes
That shakes its moneymaking pot unshorn

Of any pretext but to beat the drums
Inciting riots in the angry mobs
That steam and seethe in sorrow’s shameless slums

A schizophrenic migraine scream that throbs
To swamp the sound of softly sighing sobs

So now we know the drill and feel the heat
As spitted we revolve upon the grill
We hurry up and wait like so much meat

Until we’re ordered once again to kill
Professionals, of course, we seldom gloat
We do it for the money, not the thrill

We’re paid to down the plane and sink the boat
To amateurs at home we leave the fun
Of grabbing one another by the throat

To squabble over loot that we have won
For them, not us, to tally up the “wins”
Accruing from the barrel of a gun

While we must mourn our stretching line that thins:
A metric of our payment for their sins

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk
Of cabbages and kings and sealing wax”
Before the oysters have the time to balk

And lapse into a state of mind too lax:
Some time to think of that old hoary saw
A recipe encoded in a fax

That says they taste the best when served up raw
“All hot and bleeding,” needing only bread
And vinegar and pepper, too, by law

To go with all the butter thickly spread
To see that nothing sticks while going down
A deal digesting them, the duped and dead;

A joke to bring a toast to their renown;
The ones who bathe in booty seldom drown

A motive now revealed to us as fate:
A grim desire that never sleeps or rests
Compels us like Cervantes to create

Ourselves old oysters on Quixotic quests
Like Bedlam’s beggars: bald, beseeching, bold;
As ancient mariners to wedding guests

Condemned to wander till the tale is told
In our own land considered noisome pests
Our Odyssey obscure we now unfold

Another encore that no one requests
With strife again triumphant; peace reviled
Replete with profane gestures; obscene jests

The Walrus and the Carpenter have smiled
To think of all the oysters they’ve beguiled

For nothing did we shake our graying heads
Declining to enlist again for naught
This time we did not leave our oyster beds

Remembering the last windmills we fought
For faithless frauds whose feckless spending spree
Left them at home to count the coin they sought

By sending us abroad to earn the fee
For graveyard golfing greens that grimly grow
Above our friends for all eternity

Who paid to teach the only truth we know
That we who lived have tried to pass along:
We reap the whirlwind when the wind we sow

As earnest as the eerie, Eastern gong
We sing our sad summation of a song . . .

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006