The Misfortune Teller

Boobie Transferred Nationalists

2011-12-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

Written five years ago, but even more appropriate now, given the recent passing of Christopher Hitchens, who couldn't make it as a writer in his native England, but who successfully emigrated to America, where lower literary and intellectual standards prevail among the jingoists. So, with a nod to George Orwell's essay Notes on Nationalism:

"Boobie Transferred Nationalists"
(from Fernando Po, U.S.A. -- America's post-linguistic retreat to Plato's Cave)

The jingoistic national
As Orwell named the type
Enlists to fight a brand new cause
Depending on the tripe
Unstable and transferable
To any nutty gripe

Beginning on the Left and then
Careening to the Right
Then back and forth to land again
In someone else’s fight:
Tobacco smoke and alcohol
Obscuring little light

Equipped with English accent and
A schoolboy’s stock of slurs
He finds another country where
A thought sometimes occurs
But too infrequently to catch
The speech his thinking blurs

This transferred British Boobie swore
That he could not descry
As single solitary soul
To whom someone could lie
And having written thus he changed
The color of his sky

Whereas in the United States
On any given day
The polls show vast majorities
In each and every way
Believing lies and hype designed
To lead them all astray

So some remain to lie to if
Someone will tell the lie
Credulity has never known
A limit, and here’s why:
Americans just want to think
That thought does not apply

This Boobie Hitchens claimed a rape
Had transpired long ago
Involving Boobie Clinton and
Juanita So-and-So
(Revulsion retroactive and
The “proof” ex post facto)

Not just content to sling this crap
The Boobie Hitchens swore
That his friend Ahmed Chalabi
Would tell the truthful score
About Iraq -- if funded with
The wages of a whore

And wanting so to play the role
Of Papa Hemingway
This transferred British jingoist
Talked tough in his bluff way
But found the rich were just like us,
Except for better pay

So signing on with Boobie George
And Dick and Don and Paul
The Boobie Hitchens quickly learned
The bitter taste of gall
As Ahmed’s paid “intelligence”
Turned rancid after all

For who on earth would think to trust
A bank fraud on the lam
Who frequented casinos while
He “fought” the bad Saddam
For years in sumptuous exile
Funded by old Uncle Sam?

Yet now that none of Ahmed’s tips
Have turned out to be true
The Boobie Hitchens holds his breath
And threatens to turn blue
Since no one but his fascist friends
Cares what he wants to spew

Thus duped and with his knickers down
He blusters for his bread
The pooch he screwed so baldly has
Climbed back into his bed
With Blair and Bush: three poodles screwed
By their own pooch instead

So if you want to find someone
Who’ll credit any lie
You needn’t search much further than
This British Boobie guy
Who’ll wind up any wingless bird
And then just let if fly

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Boobie Counter Insurgency

2011-11-27T16:22:00.000-08:00

(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-linguistic retreat to Plato's Cave)

If offered help you'd best refuse
For if you should relent
They'll draw an arbitrary line
Through problems transient
And complicate them all so as
To make them permanent

They’d like to spend a “night,” they say
To get inside the door
But after years you’ll find them fast
Asleep upon your floor
In no apparent haste to end
Their stay that you abhor

Like suitors of Penelope
They make themselves at home
In yours – till you will marry them
Or read to them a tome
That ends when brave Ulysses comes
From back across the foam

They start with talking of a “race”
But just as a pretense
Once underway, the “journey” talk
Begins to change the sense:
“Accomplished” missions leading to
No perfect in their tense

A hanging concentrates the mind;
No hangings, the reverse
When no one hangs for screwing up
Results become perverse
Rewards buy more incompetence
And gild the golden purse

Incompetents attract their ilk
They know no other kind
And so they concentrate like sludge
A residue refined
To gum up all the moving parts
And leave them in a bind

The Law of Parkinson explains
Bureaucracy’s demands
Just make more room to make more work
For still more willing hands
There’s room enough for everyone
When all the yeast expands

The Peter Principle sets in
And all float to the top
The good get out; the bad stay on:
Promotion will not stop
It doesn’t matter what they do,
Or how they fail and flop

“You fuck up then you move up” goes
The slogan of the day
Republican philosophy
For how to make some hay
Insurgencies have payrolls that
Would tempt a Kenneth Lay

To “counter” the insurgency
You first put on your crown
And then “elect” your puppets till
You start to spiral down
To end up with the worst of all:
George Bush and Michael Brown

Great nations, so the saying goes,
Cannot fight little wars
It just makes them look little
Like the whores that staff the bars:
Those widowed native women folk
Whose men died for our cars

We had to have the oil, it seems,
To make our gas and fuel
No matter that the price has soared
While Halliburton gruel
Fed to the troops to keep them fit
Has made them mean and cruel

But when a bloated, idle firm
Has little real to do
It either lays employees off
Or makes a pooch to screw
Then buys up some screwdriver stock
With options for a few

And then consultants come to call
To market mantras cool:
Some jaundiced, jaded, jargon jive
To mesmerize the fool
Which Dick and Don have taught to George
To make of him a tool

The trophy chief executive
Requires the use of sound
A propaganda catapult,
Some noise he needs to pound
He doesn’t have to know “above”
From “under” or “around”

Deciding to decide he picks
Decision as his guide
He chooses choices chosen for
The options that they hide
He puts them “on the table” then
Onto the floor they slide

He turns both tides and corners and
He chews gum as he walks
Then chokes and stumbles, yanked by strings,
As his bad puppet balks
Refusing to “eliminate”
The “enemy” he stalks

Technology will save the day
Or so we have been told
Our vastly overpriced machine
Will keep away the cold
Although “insurgents” wreck it with
“Improvisation” bold

The war to have more war again
Has made war without end:
Careers for all the supple ones
Whose rubber ethics bend
Until their “honor” turns to rust:
A blood-stain’s reddish blend

But why not send some campaign staff?
Those smarmy puerile jerks
Who masturbate to thoughts of “war”
With all its rank and perks
Who find “good bidness” where it “is”
And who cares if it works?

They’ll camp inside the castle walls
Some hamburgers to munch
And never go outside the wire
To brave the deadly crunch
While talking tough about Tehran
Where they’d be someone’s lunch

The days and weeks and months go by
With more excuses still
For why the costs keep rising while
The “enemy” we kill
But, What the hell? It’s free-lunch war!
The kids will pay the bill

Republicans can talk a fight
Until the buildings fall
They then attack the innocent
And squawk a shrieking squall
Producing only years of talk
To cover for it all

So “Hell is on the way,” alright,
Dick Cheney’s vow fulfilled
They fell asleep on watch and got
Three thousand of us killed
Then ran off half a world away
To have some oil wells drilled

In only six more months of this
The numbers will accrue
To show we’ve lost three thousand more
With no apparent clue
Explaining why we’ve spent more time
Than fighting World War Two

We used to have great enemies
But now we’ve only small
We shot a cannon at a wasp
Collapsing hive and hall
And now upon our bee-stung ass
The insects swarm and crawl

We’ve bought another cannon, though,
Because it makes more bang
And generates huge profits for
The ones who hire the gang
Who, when the sand gets in the gears,
Ignore the clunk and clang

The blowback, though, comes round in time;
No one has yet escaped.
Vietnamized; Iraqified;
Corrupted by the raped,
The “victors” thus are vanquished by
The monkeys that they aped.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

George Armstrong Custer Bush

2011-11-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

(First written on 7/2/2005 after reading that America's criminal invasion of Iraq had acquired a "new, improved" -- meaning, recycled from Vietnam -- military metaphor to explain it all: namely, "fly paper." See: the flypaper American GIs offer themselves to the "enemy" flies who then stick to the flypaper GIs until the whole sticky mess -- used up flypaper and dead flies -- gets thrown into the trashcan of history. See? No? OK, then, consider what still looks for all the world like the grim story of George Armstrong Custer revisited.)

Shades of Dien Bien Phu and the Little Big Horn!

Now I think I get it! President George "Deputy Dubya" Bush really did have a strategy when he invaded Iraq over two years ago. Yes, and you unbelievers thought he just blundered into a bloody quagmire with his empty head stuffed solidly up his butt. No way. The man had a plan!

Just like the French at Dien Bien Phu or George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn, or Ronald Reagan's Marines at the Beirut Airport, Deputy Dubya decided to send his troops down into an indefensible hole in the ground and "bait" the enemy into coming after them. Then, when the American forces found themselves surrounded, they would just wipe out the enemy all around them. What a genius plan!

In a repetitive and totally inane speech the other day, Deputy Dubya reminded us of why foreigners consider Americans among the dumbest people ever to walk the earth. Even aside from trying to pull that discredited "9/11 = Saddam Hussein" canard for the umpteenth time, the really stupid bit came when Dubya the Dullard let us in on his clever scheme to invade a country that didn't have terrorists just so he could create a country that did. Now that the "terrorists" who didn't exist in Iraq under Saddam Hussein now do exist in that country (with Saddam Hussein in jail for the past year), the killing of Americans and Iraqis can just go on and on and on because .... well ... because ... well ... BECAUSE IT HAS ALREADY STARTED! You see, in American logic, starting something justifies doing what you've started doing once you've started doing it. See? Hmmmmmmm? How can anyone expect Americans to stop doing anything stupidly suicidal once they begin doing it? Hmmm? Doesn't that make perfect American sense? Hmmmm?

Canon-fodder British soldiers in World War I and American GIs in Vietnam had a slogan for this kind of self-referential, tautological strategic tail-chasing: "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

See: as "big-thinking" American domino theorists like Henry Kissinger keep telling us decade after decade, our friends won't respect us and our enemies won't fear us if we stop acting stupidly! Don't you see the logic of it? See: "big thinking" American domino theorists simply assume that our friends respect stupidity and our enemies fear it. Why do you find this so hard to understand? And stop laughing!

Early in the Vietnam War, genius American generals used to laugh at the French generals for putting their troops into that hopeless trap at Dien Bien Phu where the Vietnamese wiped them with artillery firing down from the surrounding hillsides. Then the genius American General William Westmoreland put his troops into a trap at Khe Sanh where a whole bunch of his troops got royally hammered by the surrounding North Vietnamese -- while other Vietnamese guerrillas simply walked around the pinned-down Americans and blew up most of the major cities to the South. Actually, this "use ourselves as bait" strategy has an even earlier history among genius American generals: like when General George Armstrong Custer cleverly "baited" thousands of Sioux Indians to come wipe him out at the Little Big Horn River. What, one must ask, induces genius Generals to do such monumentally stupid things? Does it come with the rank?

George W. Bush cleverly avoided service in the Vietnam War where he might have learned from all the stupid things our former Presidents and generals did there. But noooooooooooooo. He had to hide out (at least part of the time) in a champagne National Guard unit that never engaged a single enemy airplane in mortal combat anywhere in the skies over Texas. Now, when he finally gets to live out his wildest fantasies as Commander-In-Briefs, he figures he'll just send the American military into Iraq where they can create "terrorists" and then "bait" them into killing Americans day after day after day. He calls this "strategy" the "war on terror." See: first you create terrorists and then you dare them to kill you. See? Republicans understand this "reasoning" intuitively, even if they wouldn't think of risking their own children's lives putting it into practice.

Anyway, you unbelievers out there had better learn a whole new level of respect for George Armstrong Custer Bush. You may think he lacks intelligence and experience, but that only goes to show how little you understand the power of Republican faith in fantasy! Just keep dreaming along with Deputy Dubya Bush and a miracle will happen any day now. If it doesn't, who cares? Dead flypaper GIs tell no tales.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005-2011

Congenital Stockholm Syndrome

2011-11-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

He started by giving up quickly,

Surrendering early his case.

He offered to kiss their asses.

Replying, they pissed in his face.

Their urine, he thought, tasted strangely;

Yet not at all bad to his taste.

He'd gotten so used to it, plainly.

Why let such a drink go to waste?

The people who voted in favor

Of him and his promise of “change”

Now see in his many betrayals

A poodle afflicted with mange.

Each time that the surly and crazy

Republicans out for his skin

Condemn him for living and breathing,

He graciously helps them to win.

He’ll turn on his base in an instant

With threats and disdain and neglect

While bombing some Muslims so Cheney

Might thrill to the lives that he’s wrecked.

A black man in love with apartheid

He offers his stalwart support

To zionists and their extortion

With “More, please!” his only retort.

A masochist begging for beatings

Obama takes joy in abuse

Receiving just what he has asked for

Which makes him of no earthly use

The little brown men that he’s murdered

In homes far away from our land

Bring profits obscene to his backers

Who give him the back of their hand.

Obama seeks praise from the vicious

Republicans, no matter what.

He suffers, apparently, nothing

So much as his need to kiss butt.

Peacock Pugilism

2011-11-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

A terza rima sonnet in dishonor of America's most recent President to win the Nobel Prize for Peace:

The precious peacock poised upon his perch
Perspires profusely, pondering his plan.
In short: he must decide which way to lurch.

Not if, but when should he attack Iran?
How best prepare the public for this strike?
Which lies to tell, the flames of war to fan?

From where the ruler sits, what’s not to like
About the usefulness of nameless fear
And heads of Muslim preachers on a pike?

Self-satisfied, he grins from ear to ear
Reporting proudly of his latest kill.
No charge, indictment, trial, or verdict clear,

Just fiat disappearance, Newspeak swill:
Iraq and Vietnam -- again and still.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011

After the Banquet in Baghdad

2011-10-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

Hearing President Barack Obama promise – again – that all remaining American military forces would (after almost eight years) leave Iraq within the next two months, I recalled something that George Orwell wrote in his essay entitled, Catastrophic Gradualism:

"There is a theory which has not yet been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad as the last. ...

"The formula usually employed is 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.' And if one replies, 'Yes, but where is the omelet?' the answer is likely to be: 'Oh, well, you can't expect everything to happen all in a moment.'"
Hence, a few lines of verse:

"After the Banquet in Baghdad”

With their tails tucked proudly 'tween their legs
Advancing towards the exit march the dregs
Of empire, whose retreat this question begs:
No promised omelet, just the broken eggs?

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011

America the Dutiful

2010-07-27T00:13:00.000-07:00

In the Land of the Fleeced and the Home of the Slave
Where the cowed and the buffaloed moan
Where seldom we find an inquisitive mind
And the people pay up with a groan

While at home on the range when the firing begins
Not a word of encouragement sounds
The temp workers leave for their other day jobs
And the cops and the guards make their rounds

When the rich ones start wars that the poor have to fight
And the chickenhawks glare as they cluck
The recruiters hold raffles and promise the moon
In the neighborhoods down on their luck

Where the clouds hang around for the length of the day
Casting shadows and fear all around
A lost mother grieves and starts haunting the land
Having just laid her son in the ground

As the war against someone somewhere at some time
Never quite seems to end or conclude
War itself becomes reason for having this war
Leaving no room for thought to intrude

Unreported out west by vacationing scribes
Seeking rest from Access Mentalpause
The tombstones in Aspen turn up all at once
Having roots that connect with their cause

Now the Fig Leaf Contingent has answered the call
From a time long ago it's returned
Once again to buy time for the guilty to mime
More excuses for lives that they've burned

So the dead really died so that more dead can die
Goes the "logic" that once more holds sway
Understanding, the Fig Leaf Contingent steps up,
Packs its gear and then marches away

Late at night out on runway strips hidden and dark
Where the citizens can't see what shocks
The Contingent comes "home" one-by-one, all alone,
In a wheelchair or flag-covered box

So the long-promised "victory" ever recedes
As the Fig Leaf Contingent fights on
Keeping faith with the faithless who've ordered its doom
Like a poorly schooled chess player's pawn

In the dutiful land of the fruitcakes and nuts
Where the sun shines between the two seas
The hills in their lavender majesty stand
Unaffected by men's howling pleas

For to go with no reason where no purpose calls
Leads to nothing but more of the same
Till the Fig Leaf Contingent's utility fails
To deflect any more of the blame

And since something was lost surely someone has failed
Only whom could those proud persons be?
Not the chickenhawks glaring and clucking for war!
Not the neo-new, know-nothing "we"!

As the first mate harpooner admonished his crew
In the mad Captain Ahab's vast tale
He would not have along for a ride in his boat
Any man not afraid of a whale

For the ocean is great and my ship is so small
And the winds blow beyond all command
Only fools and the drowned ever this truth forget
Which is why they should stay on dry land

But the day-trippers out for a float on the pond
Seldom think of the perilous shoals
So they send off the Fig Leaf Contingent to fight
Absent only some well-defined goals

Thus they played on TV what in real life demands
More than Hobbits, and Wizards, and Elves
And they taught us our duty much better by far
Than they put into practice themselves

So we've come back again from our exile abroad
With our tattered ranks bitter and sore
Having done what our Maximum Leader would not
All of that and a hundred times more

We are here `cause we're here `cause we're here `cause we're here
And for no other reason on earth
But for us in the Fig Leaf Contingent, we know
What our duty and honor are worth

So we will not abandon to memory's hole
Those we loved and who loved us in turn
Still we go to our graveyards secure in our trust
That America never will learn

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Changing Commanders-in-Brief

2009-10-31T15:32:00.000-07:00

The last guy-in-charge said, “Go shopping.”
This war, he said, wouldn’t last long;
Our victims, he swore, would repay us
For plundering them for a song.

In six months, at most, we’d be winners;
The enemy vanquished and fled;
And then, with our mission accomplished,
We’d leave them to count up their dead.

Our generals trained for the last war,
Their learning-curve zero or less.
In six years they’ll figure out something;
Just what, will be anyone’s guess.

They had them a “surge” in their payments
To “enemies” placed on the dole
So they wouldn’t shoot us so often
Because of their land that we stole.

The new guy took over, saluting,
A race that had already run
Its course, ‘cause the bungler before him
Had exploited all of the fun.

The new guy got rolled up like sushi.
He blew his chance early to leave.
More "surging" has just raised the death count.
What next does he have up his sleeve?

It sounded so good while campaigning:
One little “good” war for one bad;
Except that the Afghans hate bombings
As much as Vietnamese had.

Our generals, though, won’t admit it:
They’ve taken eight years to do what?
Yet somehow they think we’ll applaud them
For not knowing doodley-squat.

They say they need more stuff and faster
Yet won’t explain what they would do
Except to extend their disaster
By breeding more pooches to screw.

In common-sense language, the answer
Replies to their “more, more, more” rant:
“You would have, of course, if you could have;
You didn’t, therefore, so you can’t.”

The new guy Obama, like Dubya,
Thinks playing Commander-in-Brief
Means mission-creep “more” and saluting
The Pentagram treasury thief.

“A trillion a year?” Oh, who’s counting?
“And all for what?” Don’t be a bore.
“And who will pay?” No one, we promise.
It’s what we call slush-funded “war.”

Obama won’t ask the right question,
To wit: “What on earth have we ‘won’?”
Like Pharaoh, he thinks he can dictate:
“So let it be written, then done.”

He cried: “Yes, we can!” while campaigning,
This slogan he sold and we bought.
In office, however, he’s changed things:
Himself. Now he says, “We cannot.”

Our Wealth Care rules out Single Payer
Our troops must remain on patrol.
The votes don't exist in the Congress
That Democrats cannot control.

We gave him majorities, plenty,
Yet these he seems ready to blow.
Now Wealth Care and Quagmire have named him:
Commander of Old Status Quo.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

A Mistaken Pardon

2009-10-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

(In the style of A Forsaken Garden, by Algernon Charles Swinburne)

In a time of deceit, in an age of unreason,
The frightened find faith in the fabulous fraud.
Divided and conquered in Fascism’s season,
The browbeaten buffaloed brandish their GAWD:
A weapon of weirdness when doom encroaches,
Whom preyed-upon pray to for jobs and a meal,
While the thief who thrives and the prince who poaches
Smile and steal.

The lies laugh loudly, obscenely spoken,
As time and the tides for an honest man wait.
If a truthful word should appear as a token
Of dawn, would the dark not retaliate?
So long have the meaningless mantras befuddled
The passive consumer in word-magic’s trap
That the ad-man’s slogan has even muddled
Simple crap.

The duped can’t see when their eyes won’t focus
On cynics who say what they know they don’t mean;
For duplicity serves as the principle locus
Of talking-point “dots” so arranged as to screen
The head from hearing no thing but the bellows
Of nothing much else than the noise we receive.
Should a thought intrude with its doubting fellows,
None believe.

And yet, as he falters, he still dissembles,
Since witches once sold him some trifling crumbs.
The one who lit fires in the forest trembles:
To Dunsinane Castle now Birnam Wood comes.
And those he kicked hardest while climbing higher,
Ascending to roost at the greasy pole’s top,
Guffaw as the Furies pursuing the liar
Reap their crop.

The law, as we’ve heard it expounded in verses,
Presumes us all innocent, absent a proof
Of guilt beyond doubt, as a long line of hearses,
Gives eyewitness testament, terse and aloof,
To death’s final sentence which no one can question
And from which no pardon can later on spare
Since Nature, despite any plea or suggestion,
Does not care.

Yet in our own country, of late, we’ve seen visions
Of what The Law means when the outlaws in charge
Proclaim ex-post-facto that their bad “decisions”
Require of them only remaining at large.
And subsidies, too, they demand for their “service,”
While helping themselves to whatever is left
As “bonuses” stolen while never nervous
At the theft.

While perched at the top of the heap, The Decider
Has chosen to pardon preemptively much
That courts should consider infractions wider
Than just misdemeanors like lying and such.
But too many judges, for lifetime appointed,
Who think of the Law as “semantics,” at best,
Enable our “leaders” whom they have anointed
Truly blessed.

The truth turns timid, afraid of facing
The gargoyle who grins at the trust now betrayed;
So why would the sheep ever think of replacing
The forces of fraud now against them arrayed?
While memories fade in a flash of forgetting
And what didn’t happen now screams that it does,
The perps blow their bubbles without fear or fretting,
Just because.

The talented traders of tripe roll in riches
Yet swear that – for taxes -- they haven’t a sum,
While Congressmen beg them to scratch where it itches
And unemployed men by the millions grow numb
To poverty, homelessness, debt and disaster
As fewer grow richer and more become poor
The fish in their feeding, ever faster,
Take the lure

Till the cows come home to the chickens roosting,
Till hens crow at sundown and pigs take to flight,
Till the world and its woes need a lot less boosting,
The touts and promoters will hype-up the fight
To customers, baffled, but only too willing
While Goldman and Sachs to the government turn
For more money, gratis, which then for a killing,
They can burn.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Fall and Autumn, from a child born old

2009-10-31T15:05:00.000-07:00

(After reading Spring and Fall, to a young child, by Gerard Manly Hopkins)

Village priest, why this decrying
Margaret’s grief for gold leaves dying?
You tell her that, as young girls grow,
Hardened hearts will coldly know
And with few regrets or sighs
View an Autumn’s due demise.
Yes, she'll weep, but not grow wise.
For the Fall will look the same;
Sorrow goes by any name
When all sadness you conflate,
Misconstruing mankind’s fate,
Like an older child reborn
Not to celebrate, but mourn.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Ichthyological Metaphysics

2009-10-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

"There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature." -- Aristotle, The Metaphysics

"No one can justly or successfully discover the nature of any one thing in that thing itself, or without numerous experiments which lead to farther inquiries." -- Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

In honor, and illustration, of this fundamental philosophical dispute, consider:

Ichthyological Metaphysics

When I need a word that rhymes with "fizz,"
A term that brings to mind an empty bubble,
I can always call on good old "is,"
And save myself the slightest bit of trouble.

When I want a noise that sounds like “fuzz,’
To symbolize a meaning I’ve forgotten,
I can do with nothing less than “was,”
Which changes “new” to “old” -- from fresh to rotten.

When I need the past for him-and-her
Or the subjunctive mood in doubtful cases,
Postulating that, and if, they “were,”
Joins fact and logic, and them both debases.

When I feel like heading to the bar,
But don't wish to examine my intention,
I can say my cravings simply "are":
For lazy drunks, the neatest word-invention.

When I wish to take off on the lam
To dodge the karma earned from lousy choices,
I can vaguely note the way I “am,”
Which tends to silence any nagging voices.

When I want to never look and see,
But jump instead at any mere suggestion,
I can ask: “To ‘be’ or not to ‘be’?”
Avoiding action through this pseudo-question.

When I need to shift from “now” to “then”
Because I’ve screwed the pooch for all to witness,
I can point to how things might have “been,”
And hope this covers up my own unfitness.

When I cannot face the sordid taint
Of life as it confronts the normal peasant,
I – like Tweedledee – say “isn’t” “ain’t.”
Conflating timeless absence with the present.

When I gather these inflections few
Into a “verb” that sums up disagreeing,
I speak bubbles as the others do,
And chalk-up ignorance to magic “being.”

When I swim in school I seldom sink,
But waste my time, like any son or daughter.
I just feed and float and breathe and drink,
While never taking thought about the water.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Mere Looking

2009-10-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

(After reading Wallace Stevens' poem "Of Mere Being")

Wallace Stevens, an attorney,
Switched careers and sold insurance
For a living.

Then upon a poet’s journey
He embarked, with no assurance
That forgiving

Readers would approve enough.
With feathers fangled and dangled,
His bird in a palm

At the edge of space; golden fluff;
In nothing like reason tangled,
Sings an offbeat psalm.

Thus, "modern," which word suffices
To redefine for poetry
What will "free" it.

Whatever its aural vices,
We know it, like obscenity,
When we see it.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

Maligned Madam does Fox News

2009-10-31T14:47:00.000-07:00

“And now we have, for our next guest,
A lady of the night,
Who has, for reasons none too clear,
Agreed to speak what we shall hear:
Some ‘answers’ meant to bring a leer
To lips that freely grin or sneer
When overhearing questions queer,
Profound, or simply trite.”

“We thank you, Madame Magdalene,
For giving of your time
To scandalize the girls and boys
With lurid tales of wanton joys
Supplied for rent to Jews and Goys
Entrapped by your seductive ploys
While honest men, your hapless toys,
Must suffer from your crime.”

“But au contraire! I say to you,
My bogus blowhard host:
I only serve your vain desire
And offer up what you require,
And, yes, I do it all for hire,
While you ejaculate, retire,
And afterwards feel only ire,
Or else the urge to boast.”

“I only see the truth too well,
And live by what I do.
I understand men’s vanity,
And lives filled with inanity
Till driven to insanity
By Murdoch, Fox, and Hannity
You use me like profanity
And swear: ‘GAWD told me to!’”

“But, Madam, what of Juliet,
Whose virtue fiction tells?
Does not her pure, Platonic love
Deflect the need to rudely shove
Some Romeo without a glove
Into an orifice above,
Below, or in the region of
Some pulchritude that sells?”

“Oh, no, dear sir! Such fantasies
Just fan the flames of lust.
As I have often told the priest,
My holes are not for sale, just leased
To poles whose sweaty palms have greased
My own with cash, and not the least
With ‘love’ for me, a meager feast
For wretched lives gone bust.”

“Then might I ask, Ms Magdalene,
About Ophelia’s tale?
You know, the Danish maid who pined
For Hamlet’s love: the crazy kind,
Both unrequited and resigned
To ambiguity; designed
By Shakespeare, meaning: ‘Never mind.
Such tragic love must fail.’”

“Ophelia, just like Juliet,
My case could never plead.
Because, as fiction, they – not we –
Exist for sport of men who flee
From nature -- like the urge to pee;
Who make up tales that don’t agree
(Except when offered on TV)
With what they really need.”

“So have you any final thoughts
Here as we end the hour?
Do you not have a heart of gold
Despite the johns that you have rolled
Together with your pimp who sold
Your services to young and old
Who wanted heat but got the cold
Of sordid sex gone sour?”

“Mais oui, Monsieur! but let me say
To males by us enthralled:
That we who ply the oldest trade;
Who make our living in the shade;
Who walk our alley promenade
Until our looks begin to fade
Know men will call a heart a spade
To get their ashes hauled.”

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Near Misses

2009-10-31T14:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard the angry bumble bee buzz by
My ear, to leave me thinking with a sigh,
That just a little further to one side
And I’d have lost an ear, an eye, or died.

Someone whom I had never tried to hurt
Had almost left me lying in the dirt,
A victim of a patriotic plot
Designed to keep me tethered to my lot.

A stranger in the tree line taking aim
Had barely missed collecting me as claim
To all I might have seen and done; but then,
I lived because he missed, so I might pen

Some verse expressing puzzlement and rage
At why I served, like others of my age,
As dupe and tool of erstwhile statesmen dumb
Who beat the truth about the head till numb,

While spouting endless lies, both crass and lewd,
“Explaining” why those pooches they have screwed
Have turned to bite the bare and bogus butts
Of “strategists” forever stuck in ruts.

The game of saving face continues on
Because the ones who’ve left us all in pawn
To death and debt accruing each new day
Cannot envision any other way

To sell themselves as masters of our fate:
A missing meal served on an empty plate
Together with the bill, a perfect fit
For us, the only target they can hit.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Neck Deep in the Big Sandy

2009-10-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

We now sink in a quagmire like
The one not long ago
In which we went insane and fought
A non-existent foe:
A Monolithic Communist
In Southeast Asia so
Determined to resist us that
We had make him go.

He looked like a Vietnamese,
This awful threat to us,
Whose very foreign nature made
Him frightening and thus
A perfect proxy for a war
Against a concept, plus:
He even lived a world away,
Which made him less a fuss.

Still, he prevailed, this “enemy.”
In time, we packed and went.
And since we never met him it’s
A wonder why we sent
Our youth to squander so much blood
And all that money spent
To buy a house we didn’t want
And couldn’t even rent.

We’ve come around to sink once more
Where no one ever planned.
Instead of Delta mud, this time,
We sink in desert sand
Because an adolescent twerp
Could not wait to “command”
Some troops behind which he could hide
His thieving sleight-of-hand.

But things have not gone well, of course.
Wars based on lies and fraud
In no time go awry and leave
Our legions mauled and clawed,
Marooned for years and trapped by those
Who – neither shocked nor awed --
Reserve the right to rule themselves
And name their own one GAWD.

With chickens coming home to roost,
Our “hawks,” like capons clipped,
Cluck mighty yarns to obfuscate
The fact that they have slipped
And fallen face-down in some shit
In which them fate has dipped
To show what happens when the dumb
Some booby-traps have tripped.

So now they stall and drag their feet
And hope to pass the buck.
They cannot “win,” yet fear to “lose,”
Which means they’ve gotten stuck
For knowing not what makes a train
So much unlike a truck,
And what makes gamblers lose when they
Confuse blind faith with luck.

They offer up excuses now,
Some new ones every year.
To kick the can on down the road,
They’ll peddle any fear
As long as no one questions all
That loot that they hold dear.
Examples follow, now, of what
We’ve come to see so clear:

We stay because of violence
That we cannot prevent.
We stay, inflicting violence,
To mask our true intent.
We stay so that the perpetrators
Never must repent.
We stay for any rationale
A baboon could invent.

We will not leave because we can’t
Acknowledge what we’ve done:
Destroyed another nation just
To have a bit of fun,
Convincing no one but ourselves
That “We are Number One!”
While promising eternity
To never cut-and-run;

Which cavalier vainglory and
Contempt for other lands
Has proved that power ought to lie
In someone else’s hands
Since we’ve abandoned reason for
Stupidity’s demands,
Secreting noxious hormones from
Our self-indulgent glands.

We stay because we stay because
We stay because we stay,
And have not one intention to
Reflect in any way
Upon the dumb decisions we
Make each and every day
Allowing war’s lewd profiteers
To keep on making hay.

The senselessness might puzzle those
Who once thought that they think
But now must face the music and
The awful fact they stink
At any form of logic, needing
Visits to a shrink
To straighten out crude fallacies
Revealed in blots of ink.

The psychiatric tradesmen say
That once a lie is bought
It then makes perfect sense to claim
That no one ever taught
The method of distinguishing
The concepts “is” and “ought,”
Implying that what we have done
Does not mean that we’re caught

In vicious-circle riddles
That contain no terms defined
In such a way that one might solve
Conundrums of a kind
That only fools would formulate
To muddle up the mind
So that the answers to our woes
No one will ever find.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

The Answer off the Table

2009-10-31T14:32:00.000-07:00

The bankrupt brainless blowhard beast defies
The reason to contest stupidity.
Grown fat and lazy on its loathsome lies,

The perpetrating predator feels free
To gorge upon the surface spoils of war:
Domestic profit far as eyes can see

Where foreign puppets groomed to play the whore
Return a portion of their greedy gains
To congressmen who leave us poor and sore,

While death upon a target people rains
And soldiers into pudding pounded are
By roadside bombs. How little now remains

Of them and us who suffer while we spar
Against the bogus baby made of tar.

Our new commander in his briefs has bought
The dreary drug of endless, pointless fights
And thus cannot discern the Truth he ought

That Quagmire in its sophistry delights
In making men of straw, red-herrings, too:
Those lifeless foes whose fragile feeble slights

Prove easy for the brain-dead to outdo;
A dialectic dodge that paints "extreme"
On any choices obvious and true,

Which leaves decision "centered" in a dream.
The feckless failures flail about and flop.
With each New Year they COIN a great new scheme.

We hear of "options" on the table top,
Just not the one to clearly think and stop.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

Sayonara, Caballero

2009-08-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

On the morning of August 21, 2009, my great good friend, Stan Gildersleeve, passed away in Costa Rica (where he had moved to enjoy his last years) at the age of 73. We only met personally one time in San Francisco a few years back, but our acquaintance through intense Internet message exchanges spanned the last two American presidencies, giving the two of us unreconstructed "Leftists" more than sufficient reactionary imperial absurdities to lampoon. I will miss him more than words can say -- but I thought I'd try a few words in memoriam, anyway. He didn't speak Japanese, and I don't speak Spanish as well as he could, but I think he would understand my heartfelt meaning:

"Sayonara, Caballero"
(A farewell to my irreplaceable friend, Stan Gildersleeve)

I lost you, friend, the other day;
I never saw you leaving.
You got away before I knew
You'd gone beyond retrieving.

Oh, how I miss you, friend;
The older brother that I never had;
A fellow spirit, wiser, sometimes mad;
Iconoclast and engineer, a blend
Of anarchy and insight wild and glad;
A life too large for death to really end.

I never got to say goodbye,
There at the final curtain.
You went your own way in the end,
As you had lived, for certain.

So, now I’ll never know
What next you’d say or do because you thought
It better to contest what fools have wrought;
That we should seek the truth, not live to show
What all our greedy, grasping hands have bought;
That we should work to save, not spend to owe.

Without you, who will call Fraud’s bluff,
And give its lies a grilling?
Your passing leaves a vacuum: huge,
Without a hope of filling.

Still, I will do my best
To live my own remaining days as well
As memories of you will help me tell
The time left on the clock: the only test
To pass before the tolling of the bell
Calls me to join that vast, eternal rest.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

The Terrible Worm in his Iron Cocoon

2009-08-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Back in Counter Insurgency School -- before deploying to Southeast Asia with the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-72) -- our lifer instructors would read to us from our textbooks about "winning the hearts and minds" of our "little brown brothers," etc., etc. Then they would close the books and say, "Enough with the bullshit. Just grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Judging from the never-ending quagmires in IraqNamIstan, current military/imperial doctrine appears not to have changed or become the least bit more effective in the last forty years. Ungrateful foreigners just never seem resigned to having America invade, demolish, and spend decades occupying their countries. Who could ever have imagined that? In fact, the flat learning curve of invading Crusader armies goes back centuries in the Middle East, to a time when the locals had an accurate and colorful discriptive term for the murderous, metal-clad meddlers, namely:

"The Terrible Worm in his Iron Cocoon"

The terrible worm in his iron cocoon:
The knight in his armor enclosed,
Has gone off again on a global Crusade
Which has left his own country exposed.

His lines of supply girdle heaven and earth;
Expenses grow terribly huge;
While folks back at home find themselves unemployed,
Yet they shrug, after them the deluge.

Or so they suppose as the flood of lost jobs
Washes over their living room floors,
While off in Iraq, and Afghanistan, too,
Our troops break in through the front doors,

Then haul off the males in the household to jail
For “being of age” to resist:
A “crime,” we insist, ‘cause our saying makes “law,”
Enforced by the gun and the fist.

The troop in his tank behind sunglasses blank,
In his man-from-mars uniform finds,
That grabbing the native oppressed by the balls
Beats winning their hearts and their minds.

Now bankruptcy rules in the land of the fools
Where the terrible worms got their start
Then charged off to do what the world would soon rue
As not worth the tiniest fart.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

Thanks for Nothing

2009-08-02T17:19:00.000-07:00

Benevolent invader of my land
How can I thank you for the helping hand?
Why, had you not come here with awe and shock,
Reducing my poor home to piles of rock,
I might have raised my children safe and sound,
But, thanks to you, I’ve laid them in the ground.

A wife I had, once too, but now no more.
She died one day while driving to the store.
Some nervous mercenaries that you hired
Screamed something at her once, then aimed and fired.
The bullet-riddled windshield told the tale:
That "freed" of life, our women need no veil.

Your generals have come so many times,
Yet never have to answer for their crimes.
Instead, promotion weighs them down with stars
But never, like enlisted men, the scars
Resulting from the bungling and sheer waste
Of thinking slow but shooting first in haste.

On nine-eleven, two-thousand-and-one
You got a taste of what you’ve often done
To countries that had never caused you harm
Yet still, too late, you sounded the alarm
And whipped yourself into a lather thick
So you could hurt yourself with your own stick.

Three thousand on that fateful day you lost.
Five thousand more you’ve added to the cost
Since then, which only proves that there or here
You act the same: in folly, rage, and fear.
In time, you’ll go back home to where you’re from,
To fight among yourselves, the deaf and dumb.

Too bad for all the carnage that you’ve caused
Who never thought or for a minute paused
Before afflicting us with your disease:
A plague of bankrupt bullies, fascist fleas,
Who, both hands outward stretched to beg a loan,
Continue "helping" us to shrink and groan.

You talk to pat yourselves upon the back.
Your actions only scream of what you lack:
The insight and intelligence to see
How much you’ve harmed yourself as well as me.
But just the same I’ll thank you to go home
Before you earn the fate that toppled Rome.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

Queen-of-Hearts Injustice

2009-07-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

I wish George Orwell could have lived to see what became of the former Constitutional Republic just south of Canada. He would probably have said, "I already wrote this story two times: once as Animal Farm and again as 1984." Anyway ...

"Queen-of-Hearts Injustice"

Pity the poor policeman
Armed with his gun and his stick,
“Resisted” by some black professor
Who wouldn’t the cop’s buttocks lick.

They say a man’s home is his castle
Except in the U. S. of A.
Where soldiers and cops tap your phone lines,
Suspicious of what you might say.

They bust in without a warrant,
Expecting submission and fear;
And if you don’t grovel and whimper,
They’ll take that as “evidence” clear

That you’ve broken some law or other;
Like living “too good” for your race.
You see, some anonymous neighbor
Would rather you stayed in your place.

Iraqis and Afghans will tell you
Our thugs do the same to them, too.
Then come home and join the police force
Because that is all they can do.

So keep your mouth shut, black professor,
How dare you not pack up and move.
You’re guilty to start with. “They” say so.
Your innocence, you’ll have to prove.

If doubtful, just look in the mirror.
Take note of the color you see.
If not white, then you’ve got a problem:
Best known as the Land of the Free,

Where sentence comes first, then the verdict:
Whatever, whenever; no why.
No habeus corpus for dark folk.
Just vanish, then give up and die.

And don’t you dare call the dumb “stupid.”
It just hurts their feelings, you know;
Which might set them off on a rampage,
Their “virtue” to viciously show.

So don’t you go home, black professor.
You’ve no right to “hide” there inside.
No more than Iraqis or Afghans
Whose rights we have also denied.

No “safe house” for you and those Muslims
Who share the same heathen skin tone.
The fascists in power have warned you:
They’re coming, and you’re all alone.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

Boobie Preternatural Semi-Eroticism

2009-02-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

(An episode from Fernando Po, U.S.A., a malignant opus in progress)

A gaggle of his sycophant
Stenographers convened
To quiver in his presence like
Some puppies never weaned
From off their mother’s suckling tit
Thus Dubya them demeaned

According to one David Brooks,
Dim Dubya spread his arms
To indicate “ideas” that
Had “breadth” among their charms
Which kept those in his audience
From sounding the alarms

The Boobie David Brooks, you see,
Disdains the thinking mind
And much prefers the glandular
Secretions of his kind
Whose little woodies stiffen when
George shows them his behind

Like David Broder gushing at
The flight-suit caper which
Once made him feel so “confident”
With each new pose and twitch
That “Top-Gun” George performed for him
With just one glaring hitch:

It seemed a little premature
To claim we had “prevailed”
When all the evidence to date
Had shown we’d clearly failed
And only rushed into a trap
In which we’ve flopped and flailed

Now over four long years have passed
Since Dubya did his dance
And senile David Broder swooned
Enraptured in a trance
Convinced that Dubya’s “movements” showed
A “learning” curve enhanced

Thus Boobies Brooks and Broder both
Seem prone to faint on cue
Whenever Dubya strikes a pose
Within their line of view
And glands into their boiling blood
Erotic hormones spew

Just like the Midnight Cowboy who
“Was formed in such a way”
To drive the women mad with lust
Till they would gladly lay
Upon their backs and part with cash
If Joe with them would play

Just so, George Bush the Younger wields
His “presence” like a tool
Inducing neo-cons to sing
Like pigeons on a stool
When George invites them to his room
To wet their pants and drool

What Joe Buck was to women, George
Is to “conservatives”:
A loser whose grand schemes have use,
Like bowel laxatives:
He cures their constipation with
The tax-cuts that he gives

Korzybski named it long ago:
The hypothalamus
Which governs how the thoughtless live
Without a strain or fuss
When glands secrete a dreamy drug
Anaesthetizing us

Thus “body language” intervenes
When eyes cut out the brain
Appealing to the lizard that
Keeps hissing its refrain:
“Don’t mind that silly cortex ‘cause
Its thinking just brings pain.”

And so the Boobies huddle 'round
The light and heat of fire
As Dubya mimes a tale for them
About his new empire
Where advertisers specialize
In selling dumb desire

But Brooks and Broder and their ilk
Find written words a bore
At least when others use them
To elucidate the core
Of concepts Dubya can't convey
By playing cowboy whore

The midday Crawford cow-guy thus
Performs his manic act
While undisturbed by anything
Related to a fact
Content that both his Davids will
Supply what he has lacked

They like the way he “crouches” when
He “swallows up the room”
Projecting “leadership” to those
Who inhale his perfume
Neglecting to observe that he
Has “led” us to our doom

Here Come the Frowns

2009-01-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

Someone recently remdinded me of a little lyric from the old (1973) song by Stephen Sondheim, "Send in the Clowns."

"Don't you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you'd want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns.
Don't bother, they're here."

This inspired me to attempt:

"Here come the Frowns"

I love a farce.
Karl Marx did, too.
He said we get history twice:
Farce as Part Two.
But Tragedy first
Must slake its foul thirst;
So, Part One will do.

Isn't it grand?
That Shock and Awe!
Some looting and then civil war.
But, for the flaw
To really sink in,
We just need to skin
The last man of straw.

Argue the case.
Shoot for the moon.
Crusades in Lunacy led
By a buffoon.
Send in the Marines.
Police those latrines.
The Army comes soon.

Then we stay on.
Quagmire sets in.
The years pass and nobody pays
For the great sin.
Thus, in one's career,
"Advance up the rear!"
Becomes the true spin.

So, "Suck on this!"
"Don't fuck with Jews!"
Friedman and Goldberg now spit
Their juandiced views.
Just send in the tanks.
No need to say "thanks!"
Then black-out the news.

War on the poor,
Trapped refugee.
We'll teach those dumb Arabs a thing,
Since they can't flee.
Thus zionists claim
Apartheid's no name
For theft they decree.

Christians and Jews
Love Son, fear Dad.
Muslims say their Prophet speaks,
For which they’re glad.
Yet what they all claim
To know they defame
Each time they get mad.

Here come the frowns.
Smiles disappear.
We’ve seen this act so many times
But still we hear
That this time the game
Won’t work out the same ---
Till this time next year.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2009

A Yellow Bravery

2009-01-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Although I long ago swore that I would never write a single line of "hearts and flowers" verse, I have to acknowledge with much appreciation my old friend Bob Shelby whose own poetry inspired me to attempt a fifteen-line sonnet on the theme of Dandelions and whatever symbolic meaning one might want to attach to them. Hence:

"A Yellow Bravery"

A dandelion in the lawn
hides nothing from the jaundiced eye
of those who view askance such spawn;
who’d sooner dig it up to die
than see this vulgar volunteer
pollute with poetry the strain
which, fertilized with dung of steer,
conforms in green without a stain
of yellow. Yet – as passerby,
and sky above, and browsing deer
can all attest: this gaudy guy
lives in the open, not in fear.

To gardeners in their pruning throes:
Please leave behind a root that grows.
I’d know them all again, my woes.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009

Diurnal Dialectic

2009-01-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Thinking of a stray lyric to an old song my mother used to sing:

I went walking through the park
Goosing statues in the dark.
If Sherman's horse can take it, why can't you?

... led to a brief meditation on day and night, night and day, and a

"Diurnal Dialectic"

Before the dusk and after dawn,
Between the twilight edges of the light,
A race obscene to look upon
Continues on its mindless road to night.

From sundown until sunrise,
Confusing lust and love,
The poet's pornographic play
Embarrasses the moon and stars above.

Before the steak and after eggs,
Between the main and minor of our meals,
The questions that our language begs
Obscure more than the god of Lies conceals.

From lights-out until sun-up,
Through nightmares; peaceful dreams;
And much disjointed nothing, sounds
A schizoid symphony of sighs and screams.

Before the going-down of day,
And after sun-up puts an end to dark,
The intervening hours stray
Like perverts goosing statues in the park.

From supper through till dinner,
Conflating dreams with thought,
The saintly sinners celebrate
What they have stolen from the ones who bought.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2009

Cozy, Scandalous

2009-01-08T06:37:00.000-08:00

With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his immortal poem "Ozymandias," I offer here a brief meditation on the current, continuing, and contemplated depredations of the Apartheid Zionist Entity upon those captive Palestinian Arabs who had absolutely nothing to do with the German/Christian persecution of Jews in Europe before and during World War II. For want of a better title, I'll just call it:

"Cozy, Scandalous"

I met a refugee from Gaza Strip,
Who spoke to me with empty, staring eyes
Dumb words whose depth of pain I could not grip
With all the helping hands the world denies
While lapping up the lurid lies that slip
And roll so greasy off the practiced tongue
Of Zionists whose caged and wounded prey
Are told to flee and leave their dying young
To weep beside the corpses of their old
In darkened shattered former homes where they
Cannot refute the garbage we’ve been told
By glib Israeli liars trained to spread
A veil of darkness over crimes they’ve sold
As “Peaceful Co-Existence” -- with the dead.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2009

The Boobie Pledge of Subservience

2008-04-17T02:36:00.000-07:00

(from: "Fernando Po, U.S.A." - America's inglorious retreat to Plato's Cave)

I offer my obedience
I pledge undying love
To any symbol formed to serve
The needs of those above
Who rightly feel that I deserve
The fist inside the glove

I stand and mumble publicly
With fear upon my brow
Lest some mistake my silence for
An insufficient vow
Let all who see and hear me know
How easily I cow

Authority need never fear
I swear I know my place
I pledge to take the gauntlet slapped
Across my beaten face
The Seizure Class knows I'll accept
Chastisement with good grace

About such things as freedom
I Have not the slightest clue
By birth and class it's come to THEM
I know that it's THEIR due
To hand me down instructions as
To just what I must do

And so I promise faithfully
To play my scripted part
Each day I'll chant Two Minutes' Hate
To finish, from the start
Until I love BIG BROTHER from
The bottom of my heart

I swear to do as I am told
I will not think too deep
I'll huddle in conformity
Just like the other sheep
To take my whipping like a slave
And utter not a peep

I pledge to stand up every day
Within my schoolroom class
And mouth my mantras on demand
Without backtalk or sass
Until the program makes me a
Compliant, docile ass

I swear upon my loyalty
To stuff my head with fat
And place my nation "under" "GAWD!"
Supinely prone and flat
With me then going "down" "beneath"
And "lower" "under" that

I swear to go to Sunday School
Upon the public dime
Each morning in my homeroom class
I'll mouth my dreary rhyme
And if I leave out words
THEY can Indict me for my crime

I pledge and vow and promise that
I'll swear from dusk to dawn
And never fail to chant or moan;
To never blink or yawn
And with each cry of "GAWD IZ GRATE!"
My own soul I will pawn

The Papal bulls and fatwas tell
Me all I need to know
Which isn't much because I see
I've nowhere left to go
I swear to never set my sails
Against the winds that blow

The Popes, Imams, and Rabbis tell
Me what and where and how
The master's overseer tells
Me which row I must plow;
To toady, genuflect, and crawl;
To grovel, scrape and bow

I'll train to "hurry up and wait"
And do the Bulgar drills
To stand at rapt attention dressed
In military frills
Just point me and I'll drop the bomb
No matter whom it kills

I pledge and promise on my word
To do the things I ought
To work for lower wages
So my labor comes to naught
I swear to vote Republicrat
To prove I can be bought

The Party keeps us all at war
Which makes us quake with fear
And so we give up all those rights
Our ancestors held dear
Which saves our enemies the need
To take them from us here

But I won't think of bygone days
The past I'll just rewrite
I'll call my history "old news"
To make it pat and trite
Which sleight of mind will help me keep
Its lessons out of sight

With this capitulation I
Agree to sell my pride
Before I even own it or
It grows too big to slide
Inside the shabby, craven cave
In which I must reside

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2005

Endless Precipitous Hasty Procrastination

2008-04-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard the angry bumble bee buzz by
My ear, to leave me thinking with a sigh
How just a few more inches to one side
And I’d have lost an eye, my brain, or died.

Someone whom I had never met or hurt
Could well have left me lying in the dirt.
From somewhere in the tree line taking aim,
He barely missed collecting me as claim

To all that I had known and loved and been
As well as what in future I might pen:
A tale in rhyme of what Misfortune’s due
When dupes and tools of “leaders” misconstrue

Their duty to “watch over” and “instruct”
Those independent foreigners they’ve fucked.
But even pooches screwed can turn and bite;
Their “handlers” sick with hydrophobic spite,

From such “non-hostile” causes often die
In consequence of labor for a lie.
They kill us; we kill them; and so it goes;
For nothing but to hide the crime that shows.

The perpetrators of this folly know
That they’ve once chance alone: and that’s, “Go slow!”
In time, all memory they hope will fade
And then, once more, they’ll call a heart a spade:

More life to dig more graves that they require
To fill the minutes of their manic hour.
Upon the stage they strut and fret and then
Refuse to exit where and why and when

We tell them: “You’re not wanted. Time to leave.
You’ve stalled for long enough while victims grieve;
Our mothers, sons, and daughters -- fathers, too --
Want nothing more than nothing more from you.”

Yet still the ones who spread again war’s waste
Claim we should not act swiftly, or in “haste,”
To stop the drowning years and years astern
Of their Titanic passing: “Never Learn!”

Our rulers call “precipitous” all acts
Of sanity proceeding from the facts
That they deny or simply cover up:
A thin disguise capsizing in a cup.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2008

A Vicious Circle Villanelle

2008-04-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

Once folly starts, it cannot ever cease.
The perpetrators of the crime command:
More dying, please! We can’t afford the peace!

Their troubled foreheads, wrinkles deeply crease
With consequences that they never planned.
Once folly starts, it cannot ever cease.

No logic brings intelligent release.
The unforced errors earn no reprimand.
More dying, please! We can’t afford the peace!

The mounting costs leave few sheep fit to fleece.
From where will come the profit contraband?
Once folly starts, it cannot ever cease.

Yet still, no answer to the sophist’s grease;
Those ancient fallacies the flames have fanned.
More dying, please! We can’t afford the peace!

The lies add up in thousands dead apiece.
The questions begged, both trivial and bland:
Once folly starts, it cannot ever cease?
More dying, please? We can’t afford the peace?

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2008

Deputy Dubya Doubles Down

2008-03-31T23:22:00.000-07:00

Deputy Dubya doubles down
Betting on bombing, he blitzes a town
Shocking and awe-ing his sycophant scribes
Known for their nodding; needing their bribes

Dim little dauphin; desperate joke
Sawed through a branch that he sat on, then broke
Losing more lives on a lark and a whim
Who but a whore would play harlot for him?

Fortunate profligate; fabulous fraud
Bullies the browbeaten, brandishing “GAWD”
Baiting and switching: bullshit, then swill
Hardly can hide both his hands in the till

Corporate crony of carpetbag crooks
Caught at his borrowing; cooking the books
Robbing the future to finance his fleecing
Greenspan agrees and provides all the greasing

Nancy, the Speaker, has not proven stable:
Cravenly taking her cards off the table
Pressured by turncoats, proposals she tenders
Frightened, this female our freedom surrenders

Blank rubber checks Nancy bounces on cue
Wouldn’t want Dubya to whine for his due
Squandering billions and blood by the barrel
Nudely parading his naked apparel

Dubya the dumb with his gambler’s addiction
Lives for his lies in a lunatic fiction
Sending our soldiers to serve out their time
Stalling till SHE comes to shoulder the crime

Boys need a mother to mop up the mess
Drying their tears in a time of distress
Dubya, though, counts on a diva to do it:
Fib to the folks who in fact know he blew it

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2008

Reactionary Rodent Regency

2008-03-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

From somewhere undisclosed yet all-too-near,
He whispered single “choices” in the ear
Of one whose” gut” decided, not his brain,
Those issues on which hung such grief and pain.

He sneered -- when told the people’s feelings -- “So?
With me in charge, they’ve nowhere else to go.
I’ve unified all power in my hands
And need but some Viagra for my glands.”

"It’s Dubya who’s had ‘senior moments’ since
The age of twelve, when he could not convince
Two thoughts of his to free-associate
Because of all the mental crap he ate."

"So who could blame me, once I saw my chance,
To grab the bureaucratic battle-lance
With which I jousted and my foes un-sat
Who ‘saddled up’ to argue, then fell flat

To squirm like iron larvae on the ground;
The worm inside, like Colin Powell, found
Himself not near so terrible as caught
Too easily to learn the lesson taught."

"For those beneath the level of my game
Have no one but themselves to rightly blame
For handing me a priceless prince as prop;
A perfect catapult for silly slop;

The kind of foil in which rubes see their kind,
Which guarantees that they will never mind
Whatever drivel from his mouth ensues
As long as I supply him with his cues."

"What John Nance Garner once pronounced as fit
For not one bucket brimming with warm spit
(Or, “piss,” most likely was the proper term)
My lowly office, I have made a germ

That gestates best just like the mushroom stool
Who gladly pays lip-service to a fool.
Preferring dark and dank to light of day,
In secrecy, I knew where power lay."

"See, Dubya sleeps profoundly at the switch
And scarcely stirs except to scratch his itch
For posing as the ‘chief commander guy’
Who barely learned to crawl, much less to fly.”

"So I have just my own self to efface.
In public, I profess to know my place.
While yet, in private, none escape my hold.
With all the cards, I never have to fold."

"I’ve given out instructions how to lob
Pure double-speak at the unblinking mob.
To any questions, we just ‘haw’ and ‘hem’.
What do they think? This land belongs to them?”

"They volunteered two times to let us rule.
Why, then, should we respect the public school?
The more we piss directly in their face,
The more they beg for even worse disgrace.”

"The ‘opposition’ needs a better name,
Since ‘Democrat’ has long since lost its flame.
But since they find it such a yummy taste,
Why should we let our urine go to waste?"

And so on goes Dick’s lecture to the lame
Who cry for ‘change’ but settle for the same;
Whom TV advertisements terrify
With images of blonde girls who might die

Unless a pantsuit sitting near a phone
Picks up and finds herself home all alone
With sniper fire incoming as she lands
At airports, greeted by some cheering bands.

With this piñata prom-queen punching bag
As sparring partner (now a stand-up gag),
Why wouldn’t Regent Dick enjoy his days
Spent torturing small mice with which he plays?

The cat with only kittens to confront
Could not care less if he their views affront.
As Regent for the infant Dubya, Dick
Has earned his reputation as a prick.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2008

A Munificent Travesty

2008-03-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

(After the Style of Robert Browning's "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came")

No doubt, he lied because he simply could,
This pampered prince of privilege posing proud
Who found a giant’s stick and waved it loud,
Convinced of what he thought he understood:
That power exercised sells its own good,
Not just extorts from those whom it has cowed.

His cynic courtiers this of him knew,
As well as how to pander to his pride:
The deadly sin they labored long to hide;
The useful flaw exploited by a few;
The narrow, stubborn path to which he’d hew
Once faulty choices led him to decide.

Child Dubya’s regent read him like a book:
A graphic comic illustrated clear
That masked the jaded dauphin’s inner fear
Of having to compete for what he took
Instead of simply gaining by a look
Rehearsed until it numbed the eye and ear.

Yet soon the longed-for opportunity
Appeared, as suicidal bombers struck.
So Dubya quickly seized upon his luck,
Transcending negligent inanity,
Compounding irresponsibility
With crime -- to profit as he passed the buck.

Upon a building’s rubble, then, he stood
And set a megaphone before his lips
To send a message in the form of quips
Addressed to those like him with heads of wood.
He swore that he'd avenge the neighborhood
On those who took advantage of his slips.

He maybe thought that he would strike some fear
Into the perpetrators dead below,
Some corpses burnt to cinders, smoking slow,
Whom one would think could hardly see or hear
His threats to kill someone that they held dear:
Identities that he could never know.

Yet, still, the ones who did the awful deed
Had Saudi friends – and well-connected, too,
Who from the coop straightforward homeward flew;
No questions asked of those whom Dubya freed.
With bull-horn blaring bile, he crowed his creed:
"The pooch Saddam Hussein, I plan to screw."

The child apprentice knight-errant set out
To prove his mettle in a grand Crusade
While posing boldly, stern and unafraid.
Advice from wiser men he chose to flout.
Believing in a “higher” father’s clout,
His earthly dad’s renown he soon unmade.

In thrall to visions fed him in the dark
By sycophants who whispered in his ear,
He thought himself the point upon a spear,
Embarked upon an epic Sunday lark,
Deployed to vanquish picnics in the park.
On cakewalks such as this, what fraud felt fear?

Somehow, he’d got his hands upon a toy:
A power dark and dangerous to flaunt,
But even worse if loosed upon a jaunt:
A game of chance played by a little boy.
He threw the deadly dice, consumed in joy.
Both enemies and friends he chose to taunt.

Whatever words he spoke, the press would buy.
Although not worth the ink and paper cost,
Whatever thoughts he gained he quickly lost.
His “mind” as evanescent as a sigh,
The word came down from editors on high:
"Portray him as the dew and not the frost."

So, unexamined outside or within
Child Dubya took to walking while asleep.
Commander of his clueless castle keep,
He sallied forth, his conquest to begin.
With trumpet fanfare urging him to win,
He rode up to a chasm wide and deep.

This great depression had an entry sign
Beside which warning sat a lonely wretch,
Who cautioned that an act of faith would stretch
Good fortune past its outer limit line.
Advising reason rather less malign,
The wraith read caution scribed in stony etch:

"A child unto the darkened power came
Unbidden but attracted nonetheless;
Too innocent of strife to bear the stress;
Too inexperienced to know the game;
Who entered with excuses long and lame;
And smelled some blood – just whose, he could not guess."

There at decision’s fork, Child Dubya strayed.
He ridiculed the wretch who said “Go back!
Or turn aside for knowledge that you lack,
Or else prepare to find yourself betrayed
Into those traps for you that Fate’s arrayed:
Too late retreat, too early to attack.”

Child Dubya to the crippled beggar lied
With every word that in his mouth congealed.
Yet in the wretch’s glance he saw revealed
Bravado’s smiling lips now grinning wide,
Reflecting back at him a taunting snide
That showed what he had from himself concealed.

What opportunity lay here at hand!
A crime to craft for Error’s erstwhile elf.
No weaponry not stocked upon the shelf;
No army not awaiting his command;
No chance of any needed reprimand;
The Order thus got orders from itself.

In all the world he had no puerile peer.
No younger child or older fool compared.
No losing prospect loomed, and so he dared
To sail -- without a star by which to steer
Aboard, a blind Parsee to serve as seer --
With fluttered sails and shivered timbers bared.

The sun came up just so his eyes could see,
But then went down for feeling hardly used.
In black of day he saw with circuits fused;
No breakers tripped, and so the amps ran free,
Which boiled his brain into a fricassee:
Stewed meat cut small like those whom he abused.

The night came on so he could get more rest,
Still feeling tired from all his daytime naps.
Untroubled by his military flaps,
With all the answers, still he failed the test,
Despite all that his “higher” father blessed:
Like deadbeat sons who lose at cards and craps.

With sunrise and with sundown impotent
To signal “charge” or sound a wise retreat,
He lost a victory but won defeat
The moment he decided to relent
To every wastrel instinct that he spent
By pouring gas on flames to make more heat.

The earth and sky and waters gathered ‘round
To cheer him on, as even turnips bled,
From gruesome glimpses of the gore ahead.
No warp or woof to weave a fabric sound,
His artless tapestry fell to the ground,
Designed by Dubya’s “thought” that had no thread.

"Now smite Saddam Hussein!" he heard a voice
From somewhere undisclosed yet nearby still;
"And then upon his folk impose our will!
Call this ‘democracy’ and offer choice:
A Cadillac, Mercedes, or Rolls Royce?
To those who send the others off to kill."

"Those tolling bells that signal the alarm?
Pay them no mind for what do others know
Who never had the chance this much to blow,
Or millions such as we can bring to harm,
Or billions we can squander on a farm
That never any profit has to show!"

"Like Ishmael and Queequeg on the town
We have no cause to pay them any heed,
These Tom O’Bedlams out to score some feed.
These crippled, mad Elijahs always frown
And warn us that with Ahab we might drown.
Just syndrome-selling sailors gone to seed."

So down into the murky gloom he slid
Ignoring veterans who’d made the march,
Who pointed to a cave door not an arch;
Who saw the trashcan rather than its lid;
Who knew the “bad guys” hadn’t run but hid;
Who’d seen their friends laid out as stiff as starch.

Yet childish Dubya sought a holy grail,
Which he had heard lay free for him to find;
But which instead made him its grist to grind.
So he “decided” he would flop and flail
While “bad guys” poured some salt upon his tail,
Which left him flightless, caged in his own bind.

His bad intent stamped Karma on his deed.
Valhalla’s maids pick others from the field
Who fought the losing fight but did not yield
As much as him who gave in to his need
To mouth a motto, making it a screed,
Employing symbol soldiers as his shield.

Behind the sacred aegis of the troops
Whose nameless features hid for him his face,
He found that they’d reserved for him a place:
An off-road sanctuary, circling loops:
A Mr. Toad’s bike ride through circus hoops,
Where Dubya exercised but left no trace.

So as the wars he started fiercely blazed
He grew more insignificant each day.
As his incompetence came into play.
When seen in public forums badly dazed,
He seemed outright and frankly simply crazed.
His bafflement loomed large and on display.

He kept insisting that he held the reins.
No power had, he said, fell from his grasp.
And yet, events could only make one gasp
To witness all the petty, paltry pains
He took pretending that he felt no strains
As servants tried to save him in their clasp.

The bugle of the cavalry he heard
Sent on a mission, his bare ass to save.
Yet this would not relieve but just deprave.
Humiliating help has never cured
The fallen angel's cursed and final word:
"I'd rule in Hell before be Heaven’s slave."

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and said:
"At last, I can command, as did my peers
Who lived in former times through scorn and jeers,
Yet still achieved renown once safely dead."
(This “thought,” which echoed in his empty head,
Owed less to thinking than to coke and beers.)

Content with thoughts of predecessors who
In death long since had earned a fair regard,
(No matter how he trashed the playground yard)
Child Dubya simply guessed that he would, too.
Instead, his blunders earned a verdict hard:
Those awful consequences that accrue.

He’d sought a vast dark tower to accost
Whose terrors he proposed to vanquish quick
With slogans trite from which he'd have his pick.
In nightmare tempests soon he turned and tossed,
Urged on to more mistakes by one he bossed;
Left only with more endless wounds to lick.

A travesty of such munificence!
So generous in its monstrosity!
A heaping helping of calamity;
Betrayal of a trusting innocence;
Converted now to just incontinence,
The duped now see their own stupidity.

Now who hurts worse: the liar or his sap?
As those fooled many times much more than once
Have now to face the corner as a dunce
And sit upon a stool with clownish cap
While knowing who has fed them worthless crap
And will again, as will all lying runts.

For who has cleaned the leopard of his spots?
Why would success at lying make it cease?
No charges filed? No prisoner release!
Why think of spurting blood that never clots?
Or any corpse that in its shroud now rots?
Who now will dare demand a chance for peace?

A bull-horn to his lips, Child Dubya blows
Yet no sound comes from out the tiny part,
For he blows backwards, from the end to start,
"Accomplishing" too fast what later shows
As failure timeless as the tide that flows
Then ebbs, exposing reefs that cut and smart.

Yet undismayed, this lame-duck churlish kid
Pretends to not have screwed-up for all time
Not just the language, but performance-mime.
As nothing can obscure the things he did,
No words or gestures ever can outbid
The final verdict on his life's bad rhyme.

The ogre in his tower has a name:
The darkling lust for power that compels
A crass and callow clod whose essence smells:
A feckless fraud who seeks a shallow fame
Through hawking snake-oil war for “reasons” lame
Because, among his countrymen, it sells.

From horrid children’s rhymes, the mind adrift
Recalls the ogre’s word, “fie, foh, and fum;”
While Dubya stammers on: “ah, er, uh, um,”
The blood of “Coalition” men is sniffed --
And women’s, too, which leaves their loved-ones miffed
At stinking gas from Dubya’s leaky bum.

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and groaned
As something wicked tantalized his groin,
Reminding him to pilfer and purloin
The treasury for greedy friends who moaned
Until he from the future gladly loaned
Himself and them our children’s payroll coin.

Thus Dubya robbed the future for today
And placed the land in hock to foreign banks,
Who sought repayment, not just empty thanks,
When plans not laid at all soon went astray
And left “commander” much less fun to play
While billions squandered purchased only blanks.

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and cried
As nothing good had come of all his waste;
That in the country’s mouth he’d left a taste
Too foul and fetid for the source to hide
The tawdry trade of treason that he plied.
The likes of him few lands had ever faced.

The Dick and Dubya Duo much has blown.
They, for no reason, millions have abused.
Their ignorance and pride have tightly fused
Into the seeds of dragon’s teeth they’ve sown,
Which into crops of cruelty have grown,
Which leaves the ogre in his tower amused.

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and went
He’d made a war on “bad” but lost the fight.
Since “evil” hypnotized him with its fright,
He baldly borrowed, then he badly spent.
Yet neither would he stop, much less repent;
His life, upon the world a needless blight.

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and sighed,
A little disappointed at the end.
Yet not for him his hair-shirt suits to rend.
His planned procrastination cut-and-dried,
Now bought for him by those who for him died,
Still leaves him with more troops that he can send.

Child Dubya to the Dark Power pawned his soul
For vapid, venal vanity or less.
Yet this bad bargain caused him no distress,
Since “have-and-have-more” friends will grant parole
And pardon him forthwith for what he stole.
That he might ever pay, no fool would guess.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2008

"All in" on a Bad Bet

2008-03-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Shrub had an urge to waste and splurge,
But now we moan a mournful dirge.

Procrastination has its aims,
Yet never offers truthful claims.

Again we stay to stall for time,
'Till Shrub can cover up his crime.

Like Vietnam in desert sands,
Iraq once more has tied our hands.

The violence goes down, we say;
So that just means we have to stay.

The violence goes up and so
That just means we can never go.

We train them to dependency
So that they’ll never once break free.

We’ve given them vast wounds to nurse,
And English, so they’ll learn to curse.

Thus, mission-creeping with a "surge,"
We flog ourselves with our own scourge.

But Dick says Shrub the burden bears:
Deciding stuff while chaos flares.

This propaganda catapult
Continues to our minds insult.

His lies he’s never once un-spun,
Or failed to twist the Truth for fun.

So now he waits for greater fools
To buy his worthless quagmire jewels.

We've gone "all in" on Shrub's bad bet.
How stupid can one nation get?

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2008

Scapegoat Job Application

2008-03-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

Universal scapegoat wanted
Applicant(s) apply inside
No experience required
Simply pander to our pride

In our image we will make you
Nothing you need do or say
Ambiguity desired
What you've spoken, we will say

Unpredictable is better
Less you do, the more we gain
That way, anything that happens
Afterwards we’ll just explain

In your mouth some words inserted
By our ministers and priests
Gild the lining of their pockets
From our meager meals their feasts

From each one what he produces
To the church its lustful needs
You must only never quibble
With the contents of our screeds

You must form the perfect mirror
Simply stand there and reflect
Into you we’ll pour our darkness
This, of course, you can’t reject

We’ll write down what you’ve commanded
Do not trouble with the “what?”
Someone else will figure that out
You just keep your own mouth shut

Do not feel the least embarrassed
At the empty praise you get
Even though you’ve never earned it
Just pretend and soon forget

When we do the vain and stupid
We'll claim you approved the joke
When we pass the ammunition
Your great name will we invoke

When our slaves complain, we'll tell them
That you've authorized their grief
When their country's wealth we've stolen
You, we'll say, ordained the thief

When the pile of bodies rises
You, we'll claim, feel really sad
Nothing, though, you'll do to stop us
Interfering would be bad

See the virtue of your "power"?
Impotence by other names
Covers up the crime and guilty
Something rules but never blames

Thus we've framed our Constitution
Nothing higher than this dream
All supremacy is equal
You, of course, are "more" supreme

Burnt upon your sacred altar
Though you’re dead, you’re still not stiff
On your back our sins we’ll pile up
Then we’ll shove you off a cliff

What we do defines our "essence"
Nothing "is" or ever "was"
Big spooks in the sky, and little,
Don't exist; but "doing" does

So our learning curve has no slope
So our E.E.G.-line’s flat
None can "damn" and none can "bless" us
Only we can manage that

So, we’ve got a deal then, don’t we?
Such an offer, who’d refuse?
Nothing paid for nothing offered
That’s what makes you great to use

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2008

Peace With Horror

2008-03-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

A leper knight rode into view
Astride his mangy steed
A harbinger of violence
A plague without a need
An apparition of discord
Upon which fear would feed

His unannounced arrival meant
He'd lost his leper's bell
And yet his ugly innocence
Could not conceal the smell
His good intentions only paved
Another road to Hell

With mace and lance and sword deployed
He vowed in peace to live
Through rotting lips he promised not
To take, but only give
He swore to only kill the ones
Whom he said shouldn't live

He did not speak the language and
He did not know the land
So why the healthy shrank from him
He could not understand
Why did they want the water when
He'd offered them the sand?

Committing to commitments he
Committed crimes galore
As steadfast in his loyalties
As any purchased whore
A mercenary madman like
His slogan: "Peace through War"

His slaying for salvation masked
An inner, grasping greed
A lust for living good and well
While looking past his deed
A dead man walking wakefully;
A graveyard gone to seed

He planned to leave in "phases," so
He said to those back home
Who'd heard some nasty rumors rife
From Babylon to Rome
Of murders in their name meant to
Exalt their sacred tome

But still he needed to "protect"
Some pilgrims on the road
Who for "protection" glumly paid
A portion of their load:
For this decaying derelict,
An object episode

When asked to give a summary
Of what he had achieved
He shifted to the future tense
The gains that he perceived
And spoke in the subjunctive mood
To those he had aggrieved

"The future life to come portends
More suffering than now
Through me alone can you avoid
What I will disavow:
The promises I never made
While making, anyhow."

"I unsay things that I have said
And say I never did;
Then say them once again to pound
The meaning deeply hid,
Down where the lizard lives between
The ego and the id."

"I've given you catastrophe
And called it a success;
If you want other outcomes then
Step forward and confess
That you believed a pack of lies
With no strain, sweat, or stress."

"You know the meaning of my words
Lasts only just as long
As sound takes to decay in air
So that you take them wrong
If you assign significance
To my sly siren song."

"A 'propaganda catapult'
I've called myself, in fact;
A damning human document
Which I myself redact
At every opportunity
With no concern for tact."

"If you think what I've done before
Has caused me to repent
Or dream that I, in any way,
Might let up or relent
Then I've got wars for you to buy,
Or maybe just to rent."

"I've little time to live on earth,
So why should I reflect
Upon the dead and dying souls
Whose lives I've robbed and wrecked?
I care not if they hate, just that
They know to genuflect."

Thus did the ruin of a world
Continue in its curse;
The great man on his horse relieved
The faithful of their purse
And gave them bad to save them from
What they feared even worse

So onward to Jerusalem
He staggered as he slew
In train with sack and booty that
He only thought his due
For spreading freedom's germs among
The last surviving few

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2008

Escalating Sacrifice

2008-03-25T18:03:00.000-07:00

I first wrote this poem back in April of 2007 when it became clear that the mal-administration of Chancellor Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush had concocted a neologism for Vietnam-era "incremental escalation," or "mission creep," calling the misnomer: "The Surge." The supine American media avidly bought the duplicitous dodge and America then proceeded to suffer more dead soldiers in the coming year of "surging" than it had in any of the previous four years of not-surging. "Violence has decreased," the headlines continued to read.

So, with year five of Vietnam II in Iraq having passed and year six now beginning -- with the death toll among Iraqis unknown but horrific and American dead now hitting the 4,000 mark -- I thought I would update the poem. I'll probably have to do this again next year, although I don't yet know what new euphemism for galactic stupidity I'll have to substitute for the same old incremental escalation and mission creep. Anyway, the updated (2008) version of:

Escalating Sacrifice

"Slow-ramp," "peak," and "spike," and "surge "
Sell the urge to escalate
Great Success just needs more stuff
Not enough has worked to date

Keep repeating what has failed:
Plan derailed by what it lacks
Just deny the evidence
Talk in senseless Duckspeak quacks

If at first you don't succeed
Pay no heed to reasons why
Keep on doing what you did
Count on kidding those who die

Keep on getting what you've got
One more blot of reddish hue
Like the sunset-staining clouds,
Bloody shrouds, and corpses, too

Toss the dice in reckless glee
Play for free with others' stash
Then demand a subsidy
One last spree to burn some cash

Someone else will save the day
You just pray for time to stall
Later when we all have died
Your vain pride will seem so small

Unforced errors in a game
With no name or published rules
Made-up reasons for some wars
Work for whores and pimps and tools

Focus-group some soothing noise
Salesmen's toys to wrap and shrink
Alice plays the willing chump
Humpty Dumpty knows to think

Anything to drag the feet
Win the treat through tricks enhanced
Races into journeys morph
Backwards Orpheus has glanced

Who is master? Who is slave?
Whose cold grave contains the price?
Wooden-headed stumblebum
Wants more human sacrifice

Missions into quagmires creep
Fast asleep, the folks back home:
Trained to cringe at any slur;
Mumbling, “sir;” saluting Rome

Any ruse to dodge the fates
Dante’s gates inscribed with gloom
"Enter here! Abandon hope!"
Learn to cope with your own doom

Just around the corner you’ll
Find a fool with time to kill
Turning one more corner ‘round
Which he’s found another still

In a circle now we go
Never noticing the pain
"Leaders" at us clichés hurl
As we swirl on down the drain

Just how stupid do we look?
Why have lying gamblers scored?
How can they keep stealing while
We keep smiling, mute and bored?

"Just another century!"
Cheer the senile John McCains
Where our soldier plants his boot
There, the loot with us remains

Pity poor Prince Dubya’s load
Praise his goad to “Bring ‘em on!”
Consequences of his jest
Laid to rest beneath the lawn

Vast, the vacuum in his head
Brain cells dead from lack of use
Sheriff Cheney’s deputy
Shills his free-lunch-war abuse

Five long years without a plan
Still the man-boy says he wants
More, so he procrastinates
"No set dates," he stalls and taunts

Waiting to unload the mess,
Ever stressing things not done
Escalating years and cost:
Life has lost and Death has won

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2008

"Stud Hamster Two Step"

2007-05-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

From Fig Leaf Contingent to Buy Time Brigade
The foot-dragging stall looks the same
Just run out the clock till the new team arrives
Then curse them for losing the game

From Kissinger-Nixon to Cheney and Bush
The wooden-head perps haven't changed
They shill the old slogans and sink the old ship
Sounding ever more shrill and deranged

They say that withdrawal will threaten our troops
That from peace only more war will flow
They promise much worse before better days come
Because worse is the one thing they know

From "mission accomplished" they've marched to the rear
And will now start the mission real soon
In a few parts of Baghdad they've built some new walls
On advice from the man in the moon

The general's got so much time on his hands
That he spends it with eyes on the clock
Not content with the job he can't do in Iraq
He vacations on Washington's block

The lower ranks cringe at the thought that above
Only yes-men and fools rule the land
While the chief politician in charge of their fate
Tries to hire him a czar to command

The oxygen thieves and bad wastes of good skin
Couldn't care less for troops in distress
Their only concern now involves stepping out
To the tune of their own planned egress

The "Stud Hamster Two Step" in Texas they learned
In the gutter of politics there
They teamed up with rat-fucking Turd Blossom Rove
To dispense hot and rank-smelling air

Still Dick and his Deputy Dubya the Dumb
Never stopped once to think of the cost
That the victims would bear in a cruel war of choice
That our bumpkins first started, then lost

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Custer's Next Stand

2007-05-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

Fort Apache, Baghdad
Custer "going in"
Whack-a-Mole on steroids
Virtue cured by sin

Doin' dumb to dawdle
Stupid acting smart
In the trap for good now
Military art

Mini-skirted booty
Cheerleaders in thrall
"Block that kick!" the girls yell
When we've got the ball

Burger King on bases
Pizza Hut in tow
Mercenary merchants'
Dog-and-pony show

One-trick gag a let-down
Victory not near
Running out the clock now
Marching to the rear

Let's "fan out" and "get 'em"
Let's "go long" on fourth
Strategy by jargon
Going South through North

Making sense to no one
Maybe that's the point
Mystifying madmen
Let us now anoint

Custer's got a plan, though
Always letter "A"
Alphabet so simple
Any one can play

Next time we'll do better
What we've botched before
Southeast Asia, redux
Vietnam once more

Colonize the Muslims!
Crusade in Levant!
Rounding up "dead-enders"
Taking what we want

Israel and us now
Just the two in chains
One the other's patron
One the patron's pains

As in any marriage
Two have plighted troth
Master, slave, and inmates
Adding up to both

Others see a shack-up
Lust outside the law
Married man and mistress
Fighting to a draw

Custer says he "can do"
What he's never done:
Occupy the Muslims
Armed with but a gun

Inconclusive carnage
Wages paid to greed
Custer's followed order
Troops from life has freed

Custer doesn't like it
Now that "it" means death
Still, he says he'll "win" soon
With his dying breath

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Mini-Green-Zone Outpost Diaspora

2007-05-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

What do we call our exposed and vulnerable soldiers that the Iraqi "dead enders" (Rumsfeld) "in their last throes" (Cheney) have captured? We can't call them POWs (Prisoners of War) since we already "won" the "war" on Iraq over four years ago, according to Sheriff Dick Cheney's propaganda catapulter, Deputy Dubya Bush. Perhaps we can call these poor souls POOs, for Prisoners of Occupation. Just a thought.

Anyway, in tribute to them and in concern at their plight, I've penned a few verse stanzas. Hence:

Mini-Green-Zone Outpost Diaspora

Far from the Green Zone Castle
In mini-Green-Zone forts
Our scattered forces "mingle"
With RPG retorts

Then when the ambush happens
The cavalry replies
And rides off to the rescue
With any handy guys

It takes perhaps an hour
Once timely news arrives
Of dead and captured soldiers
And lost Iraqi lives

Somewhere we've got a mission
That no one can explain
It promises to triumph
With just a bit more pain

For sure, we hear, our "leaders"
In uniform and not
With yet more blood and billions
Could plan an "ink stain" spot

They work in bits and pieces
A little here and there
And see some hints of "progress"
Just never any where

They travel to the future
And tell us what they've seen:
That things, absent their fuck-ups,
Would soon get really mean

We need them to continue,
They say of what they've done,
Because if we stop losing
The "bad guys" will have "won"

The country's off its rocker
When talk like this persists
While troop retention withers
And no one new enlists

Yet if they wreck the Army
Perhaps some good will come
For with no foreign legion
They might not act so dumb

It hurts to lose our soldiers
But many profit, too
So why give up the gravy
Slurped by the greedy few?

The country's lost its marbles
That such a thing should be
As suits and brass commanding
Naught but their perfidy

We've learned of those "belief tanks"
Where no one thinks of doubt
And "scholars" scream for "going in"
But not for getting out

We've got the dumbest "leaders"
Who ever walked the earth:
Those lowered expectations
Of less than zero worth

So tell us of the "new" plan
We cannot wait to hear
The brilliant scheme you've cooked up:
What next we have to fear

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

For Whom the Moving Finger Writes

2007-04-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

Omar Khayyam said something much, I think:
Who from iambic couplets did not shrink
To say in verse that each relates to all
As all relates to those of us who crawl
Beneath that huge inverted dome of sky
Which rolls, indifferent to you and I;
Which writes with moving finger and moves on
From twilight through the dark until the dawn
Regarless of what piety or wit
We beg to live again a word of it
Nor with our tears wash out a single line:
The poem of our past we can't refine

John Donne wrote also of a clod of earth
From off a continent defined at birth:
An island in itself, as is no man
Who yet connects to all the human clan
So that which we of others would compel
Ourselves must suffer and endure as well
For we and they can not identify
A reason why yet one more soul should die
To mark with tolling bells its passage plus
The knowledge that its passing lessens us
So let us not ask what fate's finger writes
For it but chronicles our pointless fights

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

This Time for Sure!

2007-04-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, well. I might as well place this here as any place else. As the "surging" magician Bullwinkle Moose repeatedly promised Rocky the Flying Squirrel each time he failed to pull a rabbit out of his hat:

"This Time for Sure!"

See him as he spits and splutters
Hear him as he tries to speak
None can parse the noise he utters
Most just think him lame and weak

See him flail about and flutter
Grasping at each passing straw
Drowning in his sewer gutter
Going down in shock and awe

Calling for a czar to salvage
Failure. No one? Change the name!
Now solicit one to "manage"
"Execution" of the blame

Magic phrases are not working
Far too many now we've heard
Still his own chain he keeps jerking
Looking only more absurd

See him glower; see him threaten
Hear the hippies laugh and sing
How can this vain Texas cretin
Hope to frighten any thing?

I know what: let's blame Jane Fonda!
How about we take a poll?
Blame Mercedes or blame Honda!
Our own virtues, let's extol

Let's impregnate Gail and Trisha
Let's shout "We are number One!"
Let's "bear arms" in our militia
Let's sell crazy kids a gun

Whoopee! Ain't this empire crumbling?
Haven't we made one fine mess?
Still, who dares decry our bumbling?
Who expects us to confess?

Think of Cheney in his bunker
Knock on Dubya's wooden head
See Alberto cringe and hunker:
Can't recall a thing he said

Thus spake Bullwinkle, the genie,
Cartoon prophet; antlered freak:
"Teeny Weenie Chili Beanie!
Spirits are about to speak!"

Now you see our situation
If you understand at all
Wonder not then that our nation
Had a choice and chose to fall

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Boobie Mirror on the Stall

2007-04-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

He looked into the mirror and
Saw what he wished to see
"You studly man!" the mirror purred,
"You take the breath from me!
Now open up your rancid mouth
So I can take a pee."

"I'll gladly be your toilet, glass,"
The deadbeat Dubya groaned,
"If you'll get all those Chinese to
Forgive what they have loaned:
The IOUs I wrote them while
I begged and cried and moaned

For money to finance my wars
On easy credit lines
With compound interest adding up,
Plus those late payment fines
That other people's kids will pay
For my free-lunch designs."

"No way!" the shiny surface gleamed
In its reflective eyes
"You've shot you country's wad and now
You want to peddle lies?
Bend over and let Steely Dan
Give you his dull surprise."

And so the conversation goes,
With Dubya doubling down
Each time he screws the pooch again
He auctions off a town
And lays more debt upon the kids
Which someday them will drown

Dick Cheney tells him, "Go ahead,
No one will ever know!
If we just keep repeating lies
Away the press will go
Since they don't mind the lies as long
As profit they can show."

So, trickle, dribble, surge, and "splat!"
They've fallen on their face
Disgusting not just their own land
But all the human race
How come no Caesar wants to come
To save them from disgrace?

George tried "commanding" once or twice
But found it way too hard
He thought of playing poker but
He didn't have a card
He added up three feet but found
He couldn't get a yard

He had some custom threads made up
In which he liked to dress
"All Military," so he thought,
And likely to impress
A hapless foreign country that
He'd left in great distress

He thought he'd "shock and awe" some folks
By blowing up their land
Then when his vaunted legions failed
He loudly called them grand
And his retarded generals
Got no due reprimand

He started at the finish line
And then reversed his gears
To lose more ground with each new day
'Till after four long years
He wound up at the starting gate
Reduced to crying tears

His "mission" he "accomplished," then
He thought about those terms:
What did they mean to one whose brain
Contained so many germs?
Why did he open up, in fact,
That lethal can of worms?

Thus, questions, questions, everywhere
But no time left to think
Of anything but exits out
Through which the perps might slink
With no one at the Pequod's helm
As it swirls down the drink

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Mad Dog John McCain Bombs Again

2007-04-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

Get a life, John McCain: Now. Tonight.
We're so sick of you and all your slogans trite
Face it: you lost back in 'Nam
So you'll never sell your scam
That if given one more chance you'll do it right

You couldn't fly a plane to save your ass
Now you want to peddle jokes of bombing crass
Seems your time spent in the clink
Never caused you much to think
Of the people down below whom you would gas

Not a pretty sight, your abject lack of grace
Seems some stitches you should once again replace
Then each time you kiss the bum
Of some vicious right-wing scum
You'll get less shit on your sagging, lifted face

Don't you know when you're not wanted, John McCain?
Have you no conception of the grief and pain
That your hero George has wrought
Even though he never fought
In the war that you forgot for your own gain?

Why on earth do you suppose that we would choose
Such a reckless fool as you to light the fuse
Of another needless crime
That you'd start to pass the time
Just until you show another way to lose?

Oh, I hope you get that nomination soon
Then your party can collapse into a swoon
From the stench that fills the air
Of that albatross you wear
Dead as your career: a clueless, crude cartoon

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Polling the One-Legged Proles

2007-04-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

Back in early 2003, a majority of Americans thought it just wonderful that we should kick the living shit out of Iraq, simply because we wanted to at the time and thought we could. Four years later, a majority of Americans now don't think this shit-kicking stuff has worked out so well since it turned out we only had one leg to stand on and kick the Iraqi people at the same time. Still, though, another majority of Americans still can't decide whether or not continuing to "win" this one-legged ass-kicking contest makes less sense than "losing" it as quickly as humanly possible. Hence:

"Polling the One-Legged Proles"

You ask them if they like 'good' and they tell you that they do;
You say: "You hate 'bad,' don't you?" and they answer: "That is true;"
From all of which we gather what? That one plus one is two?

Majorities, we learn, like wars that sound like lots of fun,
And more than half will always say we shouldn't "cut and run"
No matter if we die while shouting: "We are number one!"

The old vox populi gives voice to popular content
With knowing not the names of thieves or where the money went;
Nor even why we haven't hanged the "leaders" we resent.

They lie and steal with such panache that words cannot but fail
To conjur up the essence of their victims' plaintive wail,
And yet they walk free on the earth when they should rot in jail.

Our Romanovs and their Rasputins say we need a "czar"
Because we cannot rule ourselves and don't know who we are.
Our rulers scoff at serfs like us whom they find too bizarre.

So ask us if we like our lot, and we will say: "And how!"
We wouldn't want to disagree with "liking," would we now?
So just imply a "positive" and we'll take up the plow.

Our "goodness" we assume as fact implicit in the word
As if agreeing with ourselves - the bovine, driven herd -
Somehow makes our conformity the least bit less absurd

And so if we should take a poll, we'll find a total lack
Of any evidence that we are other than a pack
Who answer "yes" or "no" on cue, and yet who don't know Jack.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

An Ersatz Commander in Knickers

2007-04-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

Just following up on one of Woeful World's many bizarre exhibitions:

"An Ersatz Commander in Knickers"

Before a mirror now she stands
Saluting with her two left hands
"Commanding" like some jaded Joan of Arc
A warfare welfare mother slick
Another monkey on a stick
She gladly held the match that lit the spark

She clearly failed to look and see
The dwarf dyslexic chimanzee
Who made baboons of her and Bubba Bill
Attacking those upon the left
Who saw through Dubya's lack of heft
She now sounds less a leader than a shill

In thrall to medals on the chest
Not nearly brightest nor the best
She signed off on a jingoistic jaunt
No judgment did she bring to bear
Emitting only heated air
Her bad decisions have returned to haunt

And now with knickers in a bunch
She lives to rue the fateful hunch
She followed on her first blind date with war
It seemed like such a little thing:
A rapt submission to a fling
That's left her used again like Dubya's whore

Yet unrepentant at the ease
Which which war caused her brain to freeze
Our You-Know-Her wants us to make her queen
She's got this urge to have a go,
She'd like us all to truly know,
In spite of all that we have heard and seen

She now says she would like to fight
And not just pander to the right
She says the middle finger them she'll give
But calculating cons and pros
She tallies up the "yea"s and "no"s
And then displays a pinky as her shiv

It simply doesn't seem to work
This "centrist" mush served by a jerk
Who likes the times that buy mens' souls just fine
For having sold her own soul cheap
She now can utter not a peep
When voters choose someone more genuine

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Woeful World

2007-04-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the World of Woeful
Greetings from the dirt and death
Stay awhile and savor slaughter
Exhale now your final breath

Hear the lies like lurid laughter
Sparkling poison comedy
See the snake-oil salesmen slurring
Pitches for their "remedy"

Pay no heed to bloody bungles
Never once demand to know
Why we still employ the vapid
Expectations set so low

Reach should not exceed the grasping
Crony crooks who count their sums
None should wonder at the wicked
Something that now this way comes

Karma works through all intentions
Bad ones drive the good ones out
So it comes as no surprise when
Ruptured ducklings start to pout

Not the rapture long envisioned
By the ones now left behind
Voting in the kind that robbed them
Hasn't cured the addled mind

Now betrayed by honest trifles
Factoids joined beneath the ken
Down where lizard language festers
Atavism conquers men

Swayed by dark emotion rampant
Arguing from ignorance
Proving fallacies by dictum
Sophistry beguiles the dunce

No defense through education
Chartered homeschools dummy down
Uncle Jim-Bob's paranoia:
City slickers come to town

Back through centuries of struggle
Abstract danger always near
Like Caligula on steroids:
Let them hate, just so they fear

Going backwards from prevailing
Onward to beginning soon
To the rear advancing daily
Losing Mars to gain the Moon

Two legs bad and four legs better
Animals all equal now
Pigs and men conspire at cheating
One another any how

Hope abandoned here on entrance
You who would not read the sign
Falsehoods you have swallowed freely
Truth you've chosen to malign

Now you've got what you had coming
What the duped so often get
Ripped off by the reigning monarch
"Winnings" from a lousy bet

Glad to have you join the party
Here no exit will you find
Woeful World indeed you've purchased
With this contract you have signed

Didn't read the fine print, did you?
Mephistopheles feels proud
Once again his whispered promise
Vanished in a bloody cloud

Iraq-Nam now has you stymied
Having done the dumb deed twice
Seems you thought the dry and damp heat
Had some bearing on your vice

You won't look into the mirror
You project your ebbs and flows
Others who are not your problem
Can't save you from what you chose

If we want to stop, we'll do it
Otherwise we'll stumble on
Wrecking both ourselves and them who
Will not play our puppet pawn

World of Woeful, what a wonder!
Who but we would waste away
Life and prospects for the future
Now, in our own blind today?

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

A Disowned Heir Transparent

2007-04-14T16:47:00.001-07:00

You pose some interrogatives
About the waste of life
That our vain cretin leaders spend
Fomenting needless strife
To further their own prospects for
Advancement in this life

In answer to your questions, I
Have only this to add:
That we must send more youth to die
In service to a cad
Because if we do not he will
Get really, really mad

You see, it matters very much
That this vain man should feel
Empowered by position and
Entitlement to steal
Since all his life George never had
One clear thought to reveal

And now his erstwhile heir assumes
That he can do the same:
Just pose and make up flimsy lies
In search of cheesy fame
Ignoring what the people want
And sloughing off the blame

No matter, John McCain exhorts:
He's just himself to hear
This two-bit twerp Napoleon
Has nothing much to fear,
He says, from voters poised to toss
Him out upon his ear

He's conjured up an image stern
That he thinks kings project
While undeceived, the public sees
The drug that they inject
Into their naked scrawny butts
That they strive to protect

The generals can't save them now
Nor can the troops that bleed
For George and John ignored advice,
Refusing to pay heed,
In their lust to "command" a war
Two countries do not need

So, yes, more young and old must die
If just to buy some time
For George and John to double down
And drop another dime
On those who see no miracle
In store to mask the crime

If they knew what to do, they would
Have done it long ago;
But since they didn't, thus they can't,
As most of us well know
Yet still they bluster blizzards of
Their bogus fog and snow

A one-trick dog-and-pony team,
The misfit and his heir
Have made a trademark of deceit
Invoking empty air
To witness their new martyr shirts
Made chiefly out of hair

So, by all means, let war go on
Lest if it should expire,
What would the mercenaries do;
Whom would Dick Cheney hire
To take the blame for George and John,
Two boys who play with fire?

This may not answer all you've asked
About the tragic dead
I only know that more seem doomed
Because all thought has fled
From George and John and Dick and those
With neither heart nor head

But now succession looms and John
Perceives his hour has come
To sit upon a worthless throne
That he sees as a plumb
Reserved for him alone but which
Is hardly worth a crumb

Since endless, pointless war accrues
No kudos for the king
Now John McCain will get to reap
The wages of a fling:
A disowned heir transparent to
Not much, if any thing

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Flailing Flounders Fail Again

2007-04-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

The Flailing Flounders fail again
It's just that thing they do
They start a war where none should be
Then blame the ones they screw
Insisting that we all forget
The chances that they blew

For instance, one should never fight
In former colonies
Whose thirst for independence makes
Them very hard to please
With foreign occupation that
Just adds to their unease

Once freed from under foreign heels
The locals just can't stand
To have some armored men from Mars
Defiling their proud land
While shouting high-school English that
George Bush can't understand

And all those dogs of war in train
Who profit from the bone
That Dick and George have tossed at them
From their own doghouse throne
Cannot survive the daily drive
To IEDs now prone

Then, too, within the Green Zone walls
Where frightened puppets cow
And bombs go off on schedule with
No one who knows just how
It seems the "surge" has trickled down
To just a dribble now

Yet John McCain says "No Plan B,"
Which casts a mystic pall
Upon kept correspondents who
Would rather cringe and crawl
Before unmitigated crap
Designed to merely stall

For when no evidence of plans
From "A" to "Z" exists
Who cares what alphabet conceals
A crazy plot that twists
All logic out of shape and time
So that the crime persists?

So Mad Dog Bomber, John McCain,
Now finds himself adrift
In gale force winds from Dubya's gas
That John has too much sniffed:
A legacy of lunatics
That John sees as a gift

Therefore, insult to injury
Requires a Russian "czar"
A dictator to manage what
Republicans so far
Have left upon our once good name:
An ugly, livid scar

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Boobie Vindication by the Venal

2007-04-13T23:26:00.000-07:00

The Boobies of the U.S.A.
Have done it once again
They’ve ginned up lies to fool themselves
And wasted many men
-- And women, too – and all because
They cannot count to ten

In fact, they cannot count at all
As we recall they said
That this war wouldn’t last six weeks
Yet four years now have fled
And left them mouthing adjectives
Like “more” and “long” instead

But even more astonishing:
They’ve figured out a way
To pass the buck in circles so
The liars still can play;
So Boobies stained by perfidy
Can lie another day

Their theory: in some future time
Someone will come along
To spout the words “We have prevailed”
Which then will end the song
With claims of “victory” by those
Who’ve always got it wrong

The Boobies simply can’t recall
That four long years ago
They heard those words, “We have prevailed”
From George who wouldn’t know
“Prevarication” from “prevailed”:
The sand he sells as snow

We hear it said at times that those
Who fight and die in war
Wish for the mayhem to go on
Exactly as before;
That blood flushed down the drain demands
That others bleed still more

Some say they hear dead friends demand
More death as weird amends
For useless squandering of life
In war that never ends
Yet who acquainted with such swill
Would call its drinkers friends?

Just dupes of statesmen treacherous
And tools of conquerors
Vain fools who swallow bogus lies
From those who think them whores
(No better than the Temps who cook
Their food and sweep their floors)

You cannot do a wrong thing right
But still the wrong will try
And claim at each new failure that
More people have to die
As "vindication" for the ones
Who suffered for a lie

But lies by definition have
No truth on which to build
But only lead straight down the slope
To get more people killed
And not the promised cakewalk romp
Originally billed

Still those invested in the lie
Somehow cannot confront
The awful fact that they have been
Bamboozled by a runt
Who ran a "dive" on fourth-and-long
When smarter teams would punt

Commanded by an empty suit
Whom they have sworn to serve
The Boobies cannot change their course
And from disaster swerve
Lest armchair fanboy fascists wail
And claim they have no nerve

The "good fight," so it’s called, we know
Means ruining two lands
Both ours and theirs to stimulate
Pubescent hormone glands
And sinews on some scrawny arms
As strong as rubber bands

Another name for what we know
As just the same deceit
This promised "victory" will come
As just one more defeat
As undisguised and noisome as
The crap some now repeat:

That if sufficient numbers die
That makes the lie come true
And if you balk at nonsense then
The blame belongs on you
And not the liars who conspire
To bleed the country blue

In six months, or "a Friedman," we
Will surely turn the tide
But going on nine "Friedman's" now
We've only more who've died
And still another general
Says we have not yet tried

You have to wonder, after all,
Why four years must ensue
Before our generals admit
They haven't got a clue
With learning curves that flat you'd think
The people ought to sue

And close down the academies,
War colleges and such
For having no curricula
That teaches very much;
Whose students need Jane Fonda as
Their alibi and crutch

And all those “fucking hippies” with
The flowers in their hair
Pose such a threat to fascists that
That the cops pollute the air
With tear gas while they beat folk to
Discourage thinking rare

Again, we hear that soldiers dead
Want yet more wasted life
Until such time as we "prevail"
In our elected strife
And have ourselves a swell parade
With bugle, drum, and fife

A "victory," we hear, would make
It all turn out O.K.
But absent such a "win"
We've got to fight another day
And still another after that
Until some judgment day

But judgment seems to just recede
As those who fail eschew
Establishing some "metrics" that
Would show the pooch they screw
Revealing them as nincompoops
With brains too bloody few

You see, the "thinking" goes like this:
That "honor" comes from "wins";
That he whose service "loses" gains
No honor from his sins
But he who "wins," upon his chest
A shiny medal pins

For trinkets such as these, some say,
More billions we must blow
As if we haven’t better use
For seeds that we should sow:
Our vanishing resources now
As scarce as hens that crow

But eating seed corn seems the way
For those who do not farm
But only dine on war’s rewards
And never come to harm
For whom the brass will step and fetch
And any thought disarm

But some of us who served before
Want none of this demise:
A sequel to a tragic farce
That needs no new reprise
To keep the fools employed who need
Some cutting down to size

For all their bloody bungling they
Need downsizing, and quick
Enough of all their bullshit and
Excuses lame and sick!
They’ve proven that in decades now
They haven’t thought a lick

A lack of any evidence
They simply can’t refuse
They call it “cherry picking” when
It’s lemons that they choose
The longer that we let them “lead”
The more for us they’ll lose

They only know to stall for time
Till miracles take place
Or someone else assumes the blame
For fascists who’ve lost face:
They hope we’ll drink their Kool-Aid and
All memory erase

But vindication never comes
From Boobie types who’ve bet
The nation’s wad on loaded dice
And haven’t won once yet
Dishonor only will they earn
Who reap what they beget

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Up Yours, John McCain!

2007-04-11T22:40:00.000-07:00

Well, "Up Yours!" Mad Dog John McCain,
And what's that stench I smell?
Why could it be an albatross
That you wear like a bell:
A dead, decaying necklace that
Suits leper losers well?

I do hope that you keep it up
Attacking us who learned
In Southeast Asia lessons that
You've only ever spurned
An asinine amnesiac,
Your coming loss you've earned

That fetid, feathered bird you wear
So proudly on your chest
Sure ought to help you win two states
And that's about the best
That fools like you could hope to win
While losing all the rest

Just like a bomber pilot you
Just shit on those below
And never see the ground beneath
Where people you don't know
Look up and curse the vapor trail
From hot air that you blow

And do team up with Holy Joe
The Judas Lie-berman
Who trashes "his own party" for
The Faux News Murdoch clan
And Zionist Likudniks who
Promote the fascist plan

Each day we've lost two more GIs
Through years that number four
Now with your "surge" you've doubled that
With killed and maimed galore
Among Iraqis -- Afghans, too --
And still you cry for more!

You have no honor left to lose
You sold that long ago
For dreams of fighting 'Nam again
And just as badly, so
Your plans for poor Iraq amount
To nothing we don't know

You've nothing new to add of worth,
Just more of what we've had:
A litany of lies and death
And "leadership" so bad
That more of what you offer could
But make more widows sad

Please go away and save us all
The boredom of your screeds
We've seen and heard enough from George
And all his lousy deeds
We really do not care for you
And your pathetic needs

So "Up Yours!" Mad Dog John McCain,
And you can kiss my butt
Your stupid brain has slipped some gears
And left you in a rut
Espousing war that no one wants --
Except the senile nut

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

A Scapegoat on Horseback

2007-04-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

The call has gone out for a Caesar to come
And rescue the fortunes of Dubya the Dumb
Whom even the dimwits consider too numb
To make the distinction between "to" and "from"

The Russians say "Czar" as their choice for the name;
The Germans say "Kaiser" and mean just the same;
But when the Republicans fail at the game
They call for a scapegoat to take all the blame

But soldiers on horseback with legions in train
Have never much cared for the fools they disdain
And rather than serve at the whims of the vain
Prefer to dispense with Democracy's pain

So crossing the Rubicon on his way home
Means only that Caesar wants no more to roam
The Empire for Dubya: an ignorant gnome.
So much for the former Republic of Rome

Yet given as bad as our generals are
Who've taken four years to get not very far
Even they know they've fucked up the Baghdad Bazaar
And would rather retire than pick up a fifth star

For what would it mean to "command" a defeat
That Dick Cheney runs from behind a boy's seat
Resulting in only more piles of dead meat
With some luckless scapegoat to take all the heat?

A scapegoat on horseback! Try thinking of that!
Who'll cross the Potomac to fry in the fat?
And all so that chicken hawks blind as a bat
Can stuff their fat faces like Garfield the cat

It doesn't look good for the oxygen thief:
A waste of good skin; a commander in brief
Who now once again demands free-lunch relief
For all that he's done to cause all so much grief

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Stud Hamster from Texas

2007-02-01T15:55:00.000-08:00

A tribute to the late Molly Ivins, who gave us the inimitable nickname "Shrub" for our nation's execrable chief executive, George W. Bush.

Prologue, In Memoriam:

Sayonara, Molly Ivins,
And a thank-you for "the Srub":
A nickname for a little Bush
That you used like a club
To bash his vain pretensions and
His tendencies to flub

George set his expectations low
While you set yours up high
You lived to tell the awful truth
While he lived life to lie
Why do the bad ones live so long
While good ones shortly die?

And now you've left us lonely
For a warm and laughing voice:
A wit to skewer madmen bent
On giving us no choice
About the justice we would have
And in which we rejoice

I don't believe in after-lifes
But you lived this one well
You did your part to see that Shrub
Made less of life a Hell
And left your mark upon us all
As time will surely tell

I have no other offering
Or flowers for your grave
But only these few words in praise
Of one who wrote to save:
That your life's labors will, we know,
Our road to freedom pave

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Rest in Peace, Molly Ivins, and just for a little something to read upon your way:

"Stud Hamster from Texas"

Stud Hamster from Texas felt low down and rough
As a rodent, he felt he had all the Right Stuff
He longed to seem fearsome and manly and tough
Even though his true grit measured less than enough

He fancied himself a remarkable stoat
Like a weasel all white in his brown summer coat
But he fumbled his lines that he'd studied by rote
When he tried to recite from his primer, "Pet Goat"

The school kids sat silent: bemused at the scene
Of a grown man determined to pose and to preen
As he fumbled about for some meaning to glean
From a sentence a first-grader wouldn't demean

Still, the vacuous varmint kept stumbling along
Messing up all the words and the tune to the song
While his loyal cult following praised him as strong
Even though their assumptions were totally wrong

Then the planes hit the buildings or crashed on the ground
And the Stud Hamster blanched at the horrible sound
Leaving us to reflect on a lesson profound:
That it might not pay big to kick Muslims around

"I told you," said Bin Laden, twisting the blade,
"That someday I'd strike while you sat in the shade
Amusing yourself with some nicknames you made
For credulous 'journalists' dumb and afraid"

Anyway, the Stud Hamster's advisors thought quick
Of a way to recover from Bin Laden's trick:
They'd teach George to utter a word that would stick
In the mind of a country as thick as a brick

"It's War!" cried the Stud Hamster, seeing his chance
To deflect all those questions about his romance
With Saudi Arabian oilmen who dance
At his each of his parties, with no awkward glance

"It's War!" he intoned with a stern face and frown
Laying claim to a bogus and unearned renown
Although he had most of the country locked down
Somehow the Bin Ladens flew straight out of town

"It's War!" he recited on cue and on pitch
"It's War!" he repeated when he got the itch
"It's War!" he demanded, ignoring the glitch
That happened when he fell asleep at the switch

With hijackers dead in the wreckage below
George stood on a pile of the rubble to show
His valiant intention to bask in the glow
Of others who -- unlike him -- true danger know

"It's War!" he declared while the Congress looked on
Absenting itself with a long drawn out yawn
While sycophant pundits continued to fawn
On George and his minions from dusk until dawn

But Stud Hamster knew that the country would shrink
From asking why Maximum Leader, the fink,
Did not for a moment just pause once to think
Of his Christian troops whom the Arabs thought stink

Why, hadn't Bin Laden himself said out loud
That infidel troops so near Mecca might cloud
Relations with Muslims -- of Islam quite proud –
-Who'd send home the troops in a burial shroud?

But not to be turned from his swell new Crusade
Stud Hamster felt certain he'd get a parade
And with his VP heading up the charade
He bought into "war" as a Penny Arcade

It all went so quickly as not much appeared
To challenge an army to fast movement geared
Thus few thought to have any strategy cleared
Through those with some knowledge of what should be feared

For last time around when the knights charged en mass
The Muslims took flight and dispersed like a gas
But soon when the Christians got stuck in a pass
The Muslims would trap them like bugs in a glass

This George Custer thing about taking low ground
And then baiting Injuns to come and surround
Has never much seemed like an idea sound
Except to stud hamsters with heads out-of-round

But jumping the gun after taking the bait
The Stud Hamster partied; he just couldn't wait
To dance on a flight deck to set time and date
When history's clock started ticking his fate

"It's Mission Accomplished!" he joyfully spun
"America and its allies have now won
And so major combat is over and done"
But, of course, all the dying had only begun

The free-market looting then quickly took hold
As carpetbag contractors went for the gold
And thieves thick as flies became ever more bold:
A chaos that many had baldly foretold

Resentment set in right away, as we know
And then the attacks began slowly to grow
As probing and testing revealed that the glow
Was quite premature, as the records now show

It soon became obvious, clear, and precise
That Rumsfeld and Powell and Cheney and Rice
Had given the Hamster some crappy advice
Which only had landed our troops in a vise

But Stud Hamster crowed with his usual flair
He smirked and he sneered: "Bring 'em on! I don't care!"
"You just go ahead; take a shot, if you dare"
"It won't be my ass on the line over there"

"OK," said Bin Laden, "we'll do it your way
You chase me around for three years and a day
But, still, in the end you will go; we will stay
Some others will step up to drive you away"

Stud Hamster, though, had quite a trick up his sleeve
He'd spend lots of dough and just buy a reprieve
From tightwad conservatives' fiscal pet peeve
Like Reagan, he'd bankrupt the firm and then leave

Just pass on the bill to the kids, don't you know?
Republicans think that's the real way to go
Then keep cutting taxes for those who don't show
Whenever the fighting breaks out down below

As deficits swelled, the Stud Hamster stayed cool
And tried not to look like he'd just dropped his stool
Or pissed in a rich neighbor's clean swimming pool
Which made him look only like more of a fool

He swore he could spy on whomever at will
To find out what money they had in the till
Then count on the Pet Press to act as his shill
And his loyal subjects to swallow the swill

The courts didn't mind if he wrote them a line
To clear up his views on their lack of a spine
He'd just cross his fingers and promise to sign
The laws that he broke -- and they liked it just fine

"It's War!" he rhetorically claimed as his due
"That makes me commander -- and chiefly, of you!
So follow your orders; forget what I do
And do not suppose that I care what is true"

"Sure I've broke the law and I've broken it good
Some lawyers that work for me told me I could
And judges I've placed on the bench say I should
Whenever the 'war' makes it all understood"

"It's power that matters, and I've got it all
Just look at the Courts and the Congress in thrall
As I spread my word-magic focus-group pall
From K Street to Abramoff’s Washington Mall"

The Stud Hamster waddled around as he spoke
Or "swaggered" as Texans say, trying to joke
About a frat boy throwing up rum and coke
While trying to grin as his country goes broke

It's gotten so bad with Bin Laden these days
He keeps making videos, showing it pays
To jerk on the chain of a hamster who prays
That one day a Rupture will End all his Days

And that phony trial of Saddam in Bagdhad
Has sure become something that makes no one glad
As judges and lawyers and witnesses bad
Reveal to Americans how they've been had

For if this Hussein had been such a bad egg
Why then does the "evidence" still have to beg
The question of why the trial's not in the Hague
Where people know how to do things not so vague?

These Soviet show trials and Potemkin towns
Make those who resort to them look like such clowns
Sure each stupid war has its ups and its downs
But the Hamster's got two of them in which he drowns

So now his trite speeches put no foe to rout
The Hamster gets testy; goes into a pout
Then he turns on his soldiers, their contracts to flout
And stop-losses them so they cannot get out

This breaking of promises now seems to mark
America lurching along in the dark
With Stud Hamster still having fun on his lark
Which Bin Laden sees as no bite and all bark

Stud Hamster just couldn't abide freedom's moan
He liked it abroad just not too close to home
He ruled a scared land where the buffaloed roam
And mouthed platitudes with his lips flecked with foam

You see, Hamster's mommy just wouldn't permit
The slightest suggestion that George wasn't fit
To grapple with problems requiring a wit
Or any IQ but the tiniest bit

He wanted so much to think well of his deeds
So speechwriters wrote him some mean little screeds
That George could recite to a Congress that feeds
Upon the young lives of a nation that bleeds

Stud Hamster needs soldiers to die in his fight
As long as their coffins are kept out of sight
And none of their mothers turn on his night light
To show that his wrongs don't add up to a right

The Congress rolls over and plays dead on cue
As long as they skim off the cream as their due
And no one dares ask why the people they screw
Cannot wear a T-shirt expressing their view

But none would allow a discouraging word
To trouble the life of this spoiled little turd
Who sent men to die for a "reason" absurd
And lived in a bubble where no thinking stirred

The nation's incompetent ruler must reign
Despite all his wreckage; despite all our pain
As long as the rich rack up more of the gain
And taxes keep falling like drops of gold rain

And never must any unpleasantness mar
The Hamster's impression of life from afar
For like a conned rube in a sucker's bazaar
He golfs with our lives and scores way over par

To make sure that power goes straight to his head
His mothers make sure he has nothing to dread
And so keep him far from the maimed and the dead
And sing him to sleep while they tuck him in bed

And focus-group gurus more dead than alive
Who market their slogans from nine until five
Hold Switzerland parties in Davos where strive
The world's greatest wannabes swapping their jive

Where Kerry shows up just to show he's got clout
Except in the Senate where he's frozen out
Of Hillary's entourage leading the rout
Confirming Bush judges who our values flout

Whenever John thinks he just gets in a bind
Displaying to all his unknowable mind
You can just see the wheels and the gears start to grind
Like he doesn't know if he should shit or go blind

Who needs "opposition" that just wants the same
And offers excuses so long and so lame
And seeks nothing better than dodging the blame
For helping George Bush put the world to the flame?

They transmit a picture of color unmixed:
Some hypnotized white folks by bullshit transfixed
Who'll work to make sure that elections are fixed
For the man who has just their retirements deep-sixed

As Frank Luntz the "word lab" guy says for a price
Just find the right language that makes nasty nice
They won't know what hit them when you turn to vice
To rob them of not just their bowl but their rice

The people who buy into brands and their themes
Do not really notice the cattle-prod memes
That mask all the well-designed, larcenous, schemes
To rake in their cash in return for some dreams

The lonely cult-follower needs to belong
So just peddle to him a sweet siren song
Then sell him some tennis shoes: he'll go along
As long as his purchases make him feel strong

Like Pavlov with Madison Avenue's bell
Or Steve Jobs with Apple computers to sell
The geeks after buying will happily yell:
"Not just a machine, but some `way cool' as well!"

The premium profits accrue to the one
Who knows how to make eating Cheerios fun
While teaching some children to handle a gun
So they win all our battles but leave us undone

The war that he needs cannot ever conclude
For that would leave time for some thought to intrude
Which might lead to questions forthright if not rude
As to why our Stud Hamster was one stupid dude

For having no need of the wars that he ran
He felt not the slightest of needs for a plan
For didn't all things just work out for a man
Who never once paid for the fights he began?

The cool word "whatever" has such a nice ring
It covers up pretty much any damn thing
Except when subpoenas to testify wring
A croak from the stool pigeons starting to sing

But still the Stud Hamster keeps spouting his noise
He wants to remain with the rest of the boys
Who get to command foreign legions as toys
Instead of the cell that an inmate enjoys

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Ebb and Flow

2007-01-25T00:58:00.000-08:00

We have done this before
Now we do it once more
We kick open the door
Leaving her on the floor
Petrified

Once inside, though, we find
That the enemy's mind
Is a different kind
So he's left us behind
Stupefied

Then we stay for a spell
In that bleak, blasted hell
Bagging up those who fell
So their mothers can't tell
How they died

Then, surrounded, we wait
For that moment when fate
Either early or late
Orders us out the gate
With our pride

When we go they come back
First they flee then attack
Daytime bright, nighttime black
It's not courage they lack
On their side

They've got nowhere to go
This is home: all they know
We can lay the place low
Blood in rivers may flow
Deep and wide

Still the families mourn
Ours and theirs, spirits torn
Of all hopefulness shorn
Only grief; nothing born
From Death's bride

In the end we'll depart
As we came: dumb not smart
Leaving others to start
Healing wounds and with heart
Turn the tide

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

America the Dutiful

2007-01-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

In the Land of the Fleeced and the Home of the Slave
Where the cowed and the buffaloed moan
Where seldom we find an inquisitive mind
And the people pay up with a groan

While at home on the range when the firing begins
Not a word of encouragement sounds
The temp workers leave for their other day jobs
And the cops and the guards make their rounds

When the rich ones start wars that the poor have to fight
And the chickenhawks glare as they cluck
The recruiters hold raffles and promise the moon
In the neighborhoods down on their luck

Where the clouds hang around for the length of the day
Casting shadows and fear all around
A lost mother grieves and starts haunting the land
Having just laid her son in the ground

As the war against someone somewhere at some time
Never quite seems to end or conclude
War itself becomes reason for having this war
Leaving no room for thought to intrude

Unreported out west by vacationing scribes
Seeking rest from Access Mentalpause
The tombstones in Aspen turn up all at once
Having roots that connect with their cause

Now the Fig Leaf Contingent has answered the call
From a time long ago it's returned
Once again to buy time for the guilty to mime
More excuses for lives that they've burned

So the dead really died so that more dead can die
Goes the "logic" that once more holds sway
Understanding, the Fig Leaf Contingent steps up,
Packs its gear and then marches away

Late at night out on runway strips hidden and dark
Where the citizens can't see what shocks
The Contingent comes "home" one-by-one, all alone,
In a wheelchair or flag-covered box

So the long-promised "victory" ever recedes
As the Fig Leaf Contingent fights on
Keeping faith with the faithless who've ordered its doom
Like a poorly schooled chess player's pawn

In the dutiful land of the fruitcakes and nuts
Where the sun shines between the two seas
The hills in their lavender majesty stand
Unaffected by men's howling pleas

For to go with no reason where no purpose calls
Leads to nothing but more of the same
Till the Fig Leaf Contingent's utility fails
To deflect any more of the blame

And since something was lost surely someone has failed
Only whom could those proud persons be?
Not the chickenhawks glaring and clucking for war!
Not the neo-new, know-nothing "we"!

As the first mate harpooner admonished his crew
In the mad Captain Ahab's vast tale
He would not have along for a ride in his boat
Any man not afraid of a whale

For the ocean is great and my ship is so small
And the winds blow beyond all command
Only fools and the drowned ever this truth forget
Which is why they should stay on dry land

But the day-trippers out for a float on the pond
Seldom think of the perilous shoals
So they send off the Fig Leaf Contingent to fight
Absent only some well-defined goals

Thus they played on TV what in real life demands
More than Hobbits, and wizards, and elves
Thus they taught us our duty much better by far
Than they put into practice themselves

So we've come back again from our exile abroad
With our tattered ranks bitter and sore
Having done what our Maximum Leader would not
All of that and a hundred times more

We are here `cause we're here `cause we're here `cause we're here
And for no other reason on earth
But for us in the Fig Leaf Contingent, we know
What our duty and honor are worth

So we will not abandon to memory's hole
Those we loved and who loved us in turn
And we go to our graveyards secure in our trust
That with us, maybe someday you'll learn

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Boobie Blank Rubber Checks

2007-01-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

(From the in-progress epic of post-linguistic Comparative Misanthropology: "Fernando Po, U.S.A.")

They ran for their election by
Not promising to say
What they would do in office if
They ever got their way
Instead they vaguely swore to show
How nicely they could play

The last guys gave the president
A blank check for his war
The new guys said they wouldn't but
They might if pushed too far
Which meant -- in their case -- nothing more
Than wishing on a star

For "pushing" means to Democrats
A hint about a name
That mean old bad Republicans
Might use to pin the blame
On those who dared to try and do
The job for which they came

The Boobies thought that they'd thrown out
The ones they didn't like
For feeding them a pack of lies
Upon a pointed pike
All wrapped in soothing, empty noise
Like "win" and "surge" and "spike"

But all too soon the new guys turned
A shade of yellow pale
The President, they said, has got
The right to trip and fail
Which means that they must post his bond
So he can then skip bail

For don't you know, it wouldn't do
To recognize the fact
That those who voted-in the new
Expected them to act
And not sign off on deals with George
Which he will just redact

See, Boobie George "decides" based on
An "instinct," guess, or whim
He signs the laws alright but claims
They don't apply to him
Which low-watt Boobie Congressmen
Accept like yokels dim

King George the Worst had learned to work
A scam both bold and deft
He asked for loans from Congresses
Who had no money left
When he asked for their signatures
To authorize his theft

Republicans thought this just fine
Since they dined on the pork
The Democrats, though, didn't and
Considered George a dork
For eating all the food while they
Could only lick the fork

Yet still they found it hard to break
Bad habits formed in years
When they watched George consume the wine
While they drank only tears
In tune to him denouncing them
For marrying some queers

So when they got back in it seemed
Just like the bad old days
With George deciding what he'd spend
And them the one that pays
"Support the troops," for him, meant more
Vacation sunshine rays

He didn't even have to fight
The wars he claimed to lead
He had some other folks do that
While he learned how to read
"Some Shakespeares" and Albert Camus:
An awful thought, indeed

Yet as he lost he doubled down
The turning of the screw
And threatened Democrats to up
The ante that he blew:
"Just sign your names alongside mine
Which implicates you too!"

Then comes the part that really hurts
As Democrats confessed
That they would never want to fight
An unarmed man undressed
For fear that this would just offend
All those that he'd oppressed

Those years tied to the whipping post
Had made them love the lash
Internalizing George's lies
That called them traitor trash
They just believed George Bush deserved
To make of them a hash

In fact, they shared his view of life
As his preserve alone
They only thought it fair that he
Should make them cry and moan
Why should he not spit in their face
And kick them till they groan?

What would they do about it if
He asked for "just one more"?
Had he not done the same and worse
So many times before?
He'd fooled them not just one "last time"
But two, and three, and four …

For when the last means "latest" you
Can see one coming next
No reason then to wonder why
Or act a bit perplexed
George only screws the pooch because
Some witches have him hexed!

"So just another rubber check
If you would be so kind
Someone will find the money soon
So I don't really mind
But if they don't, you've still no right
To put me in a bind"

"I never asked permission but
Forgiveness I'll now take
Just 'cause I lied for practice
Don't consider me a fake
Or think that over burning coals
My lying ass you'll rake"

"You bought into my lies at first
And that makes you look dumb
And now you can't admit it so
You're now beneath my thumb
And I can go on lying 'cause
Your brain's already numb"

"Somehow you think that time will pass
And folks will just forget
The ease with which I suckered you
Each time I placed a bet
And you bankrolled my losing
Though I haven't won once yet"

"Just sign upon the dotted line;
I'm sure you know your place
I swear I won't come back next year
And throw it in your face:
How this, your very signature,
Means my war you embrace"

"Those fingers crossed behind my back?
Why, pay no mind to those
They only indicate what I
Have no wish to disclose:
That I have sundry plans afoot
For giving you the hose!"

"You know from past experience
How I have jerked your chain
And yet you keep on coming back;
You simply can't abstain
From "just one more last" whipping which
Must mean you like the pain"

"I've only got two years to go
So that means two more checks
Just give me this one now despite
The budget that it wrecks
Your kids will pay it back one day
With chains around their necks"

Republicans have words for things
All lined up in a row
They think that they can spout some words
And that will make things so
Which Democrats confirm each time
They eat a meal of crow

So, yes, "just one more last time" check
For blood and sweat and tears
Just like the other "one last times"
We've had the last four years:
A bouncing rubber bankruptcy
Refinancing our fears

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Just One More Last Blank Rubber Check

2007-01-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

The American Government wants "just one more last blank rubber check" from the American people. What does that mean?

Well, that depends on what "just," "one," "more," "last," "blank," "rubber," and "check" mean, both as individual words and collectively as a bloated Orwellian euphemism designed specifically to confuse and demoralize the American people.

After four straight "war" years of bald-faced, unfunded raids on the American blood bank and treasury, we can only marvel at the chutzpah -- i.e., "unmitigated gall" -- of a government completely unembarrassed by a record of reckless, bloody blundering unprecedented in the nation's history. Even worse, though, must come the judgment of future historians wondering how on earth any nation so willingly plundered by its own rapacious "leadership" could dare to consider itself "modern," let alone "civilized" or even "educated"?

Reportedly a "democracy," the American voters in the last election soundly repudiated Sheriff Dick Cheney, Deputy Dubya Bush (the Mayberry Machiavellis) along with the Republican Party (the Mayberry town council) for insisting that both America and Iraq allow George W. Bush to continue his little ego trip playing commander-in-briefs for at least two more fruitless, inconclusive years (that would make six in total) at a cost that no one can even begin to calculate for benefits that no one has ever stipulated. So where could words like "just" (meaning "merely"), "one" (meaning "less than two"), "more" (meaning "additional"), and "last" (meaning "latest in a long sequence") fit into any sentence that a human brain could process without self-destructing from the internal inconsistencies? (Think here of the old Star Trek movie where Spock cleverly disables a diabolical computer by asking it to compute "to the last decimal point" the value of Pi.) Given the unmistakeable electoral repudiation, Sheriff Dick, Deputy Dubya, the Republican Party, and now the Democratic Party as well, apparently wish to tell the voters -- in effect -- to go screw themselves and their "democracy." The governing group, as Sheriff Dick said even before the electoral spanking, plans to "stay the course" and contiue steaming "full speed ahead" right into the giant iceberg clearly floating ominously in the direct path of the Titanic. To hell with the expressed survival instincts of the ticket-paying passengers!

With the newly installed Madam Speaker of the House wielding the purse strings to the nation's empty purse, we then have to ask who wears the pants in the new "family valued" Congess? But then, how could we possibly tell, what with everybody in Congress running around in their soiled Iraqi diapers?

I just heard Speaker Nancy Pelosi promise "no blank check" for Deputy Dubya's long-lost war on the now-hung Saddam Hussein and his long-defunct government of Iraq that never had any WMD, ties to Al Qaida, or involvemtent in 9/11/2001. Then, I immediately heard from her "number two," Steny Hoyer, that he thought differently. Now, don't these people ever talk to each other before they talk to everyone else out of both side of their mouths at the same time? And that just goes for starters in the House.

Over in the Senate, we have the Democratic Party's "leader," Hary Reid, joining Nancy Pelosi in "opposing" any more troops for Iraq. Then, we immediately hear from Democratic Senator "Bloviatin' Joe" Biden that the President can have whatever war he wants and no Congress can tell him anything about how, where, when, or why to wage it.

These people just don't get it. They simply can't cut the crap. The people want them to do three things: (1) cut the funding, (2) revoke the authorization, and (3) punish the perps. That will end the present Amrerican War on Iraq and teach the governing group not to even think about any more such disasters for at least another twenty years. Despite what Bloviatin' Joe says, previous Congresses have done all three of these things and this Congress had better get started on all three of them simultaneously now. We demand that they cut out the crappy mixed metaphors and flawed figures of speech. We've heard them all for four years running and don't want to hear them anymore.

The issue for deadbeat, free-lunch America doesn't involve "blank checks" but "rubber," "bouncing" ones. It doesn't matter if the rubber check has only the busted gambler Deputy Dubya's worthless signature on it or comes with the worthless counter-signature of a spineless Democratic Congress, too. The rubber check bounces no matter how many crooks countersign for each other. The looted American treasury has no money in it and no new stream of tax revenues to replenish the account. So Dubya and the Democrats think they can just go on tapping the kids' trust fund "just one more last time" for absolutely nothing? They need to cut the crap and stop the thieving. They need to quit robbing the future to pay for more needless warfare welfare and makework militarism. Our kids and grandkids who haven't even gotten jobs and started paying payroll taxes yet need us to stand up for them and tell our lying, incompetent, dingbat governing group: "Stop, thieves!"

Now, Congressmen, Senators, and corrupt co-Presidents: clean your dirty diapers and put either your dresses or pants on over them. And then cut the crap. Start putting money back into the accounts. Start replenishing the nation's blood bank. No more rubber checks -- blank or otherwise -- that you sign yourselves when you all ought to serve time in jail for conspiracy to defraud the American people.

Escalating Sacrifice

2007-01-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

(In the Gaelic Bardic verse style)

"Slow-ramp," "peak," and "spike," and "surge "
Sell the urge to escalate
Great Success just needs more stuff
Not enough has worked to date

Keep repeating what has failed:
Plan derailed by what it lacks
Just deny the evidence
Talk in senseless Duckspeak quacks

If at first you don't succeed
Pay no heed to reasons why
Keep on doing what you did
Count on kidding those who die

Keep on getting what you've got
One more blot of reddish hue
Like the sunset staining clouds,
Sky, and shrouds, and ledgers, too

Toss the dice in reckless glee
Play for free with others' stash
Then demand a subsidy
One last spree to burn some cash

Someone else will save the day
You just pray for time to stall
Later when we all have died
Your vain pride will seem so small

Unforced errors in a game
With no name or published rules
Made-up reasons for some wars
Work for whores and pimps and fools

Focus-group some soothing noise
Salesmen's toys to wrap and shrink
Alice plays the willing chump
Humpty Dumpty knows to think

Anything to drag the feet
Win the treat through tricks enhanced
Races into journeys morph
Backwards Orpheus has glanced

Who is master? Who is slave?
Whose cold grave contains the price?
Wooden-headed stumblebum
Wants some human sacrifice

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Metrics for Measure

2007-01-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

(Dedicated to Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son, from a son who lost his mother)

Note*: Two years ago when I first wrote this poem, the two multiplier-syllables "thirty" in the second line of the third stanza read "twenty." Otherwise, the verses remain in no need of changing -- with still no sign of pity and mercy from those now unfortunately entrusted with the power to show and grant both.

The pricking of his thumbs begins to sting
With something fell and wicked-coming fraught
Entangled with the painful playful thing
Wherein the conscience of the prince is caught

Now Isabella camps outside his ranch
Her silent supplication real not fake
Her rude requests for justice make him blanch
Her simple power poised to grab and shake

Her time, down in a roadside ditch, she bides
With thirty*-hundred crosses witness mute
While safe within his bubble he resides
The gashes in the dead his lies confute

His thought no counsel credible informs
So on he stumbles, mouthing scripted rhyme
Upon the gibbet’s scaffold he performs
For his allotted fifteen minutes’ time

An angry ape with glassy essence clear
Before high heaven trotting out his trick
Afraid of nothing quite so much as fear
Which makes splenetic angels laugh till sick

Assured of his own ignorance he pressed
To have himself informed of what he knew
In little brief authority he dressed
So as to mask his nakedness from view

His counselor, the clown, roved here and there
Professing, like Rasputin, cures to know
For royal hemophilia laid bare
As turds that blossom on the frozen snow

But still the would-be great no greatness had
They thus could only mock the small who sobbed
Until disrobed, in disrepute unclad,
Their perfidy showed clear to those they’d robbed

But Gandalf once to Frodo Baggins said,
In telling him his uncle Bilbo’s tale,
That even small ones lost in fear and dread
Can turn the blast of fortune’s greatest gale

For Bilbo spared the vicious Gollum’s good
In pity of one long so lonely lost
And would not strike him even though he could
Which in the end saved all great evil’s cost

No doubt some live who maybe ought to die
And some that die deserve to live instead
But who shall make of his own life a lie
Who deals out death in judgment of the dead?

And as the wizard might have said at length
What Isabella did, a court to sway:
How excellent to have a giant’s strength
But tyrannous to use it in that way

For even very wise ones cannot see
The end to all the mischief that ensues
From feckless fights and their mad misery
As complex as a rainbow’s many hues

And as such smallish suitors might combine
Soliciting compassion as their cause
They plead for pity in a single line
That pelting petty officers might pause

For making thunder just to hear the noise
And lightning just to see the awe and shock
If overused by adolescent boys
Will look more like the chicken than the hawk

They like it well enough when first they think
That all will go exactly as they dream
But soon enough they shun the fetid stink
That clogs the nose and gags them till they scream

Those wise who hold great power in reserve
And do not waste it in a foolish deed
Have moral power more which well will serve
When faced with future’s grave and greater need

Thus Isabella Baggins now implores
The one who can to pity those who serve
And bring them home from bloody foreign shores
To reap the future lives that they deserve

We only ask for metrics we can use
To measure what is often promised glib
By bureaucrats who went and lit the fuse
And now can only hedge, and stall, and fib

Yet once more he reiterates his lies
He now commands no love from him that dies
With shoulders of a dwarfish thief he tries
To wear a giant’s robe above his size

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005, 2007

Let's Already Do It Again

2007-01-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

Let's already do it again
Let's write with no ink in the pen
On the paper no trace of the egg on our face
Let's already do it again

Let's start on our very next loss
With a coin and some dice and a toss
Let's forget this here game where we've come up so lame
The next time around we'll be boss

Let's hurry to do it again
With the chorus still shouting "Amen!"
Before we can think of the fact that we stink
Let's pour on the perfume and then…

Let's you and him get in a fight
Then we'll get involved for a night
Helping out here and there, we'll of course gladly share
What was yours that we've "earned" with our might

The brass needs a billet or two
And some soldiers in order to screw
A few jumbo jets and they've got no regrets
Not with CNN asking their view

They "can do," you see, though they can't
Rhetorically venting their rant
They talk a good show then the battle they slow
Making "long time" the footprint they plant

A "journey," they say, not a "race"
Attempting to save naked face
In four years and more, they've produced a "long war"
Of their "victory" -- no sign or trace

Let's unlearn our history now
And not ask about why or how
While still sort of numb and sufficiently dumb
Let's not any learning allow

We failed in Vietnam before
Despite all the blood, guts, and gore
Yet no fortune's vast for our leadership caste
To squander on warbucks galore

A syndrome we need to construct
To conceal the true fact that we're fucked
Our governing group has just stepped in the poop
Now they've got to deny that they've sucked

We need war to prop up the few
Who really have nothing to do
Their lack of a skill means that others must kill
To produce all the "metrics" they skew

The Worst and the Dullest, they paint
Every failure with their smell and taint
In a rut or a groove, they have set out to prove
What Tweedledee said "isn't" ain't

We've got the worst leadership team:
A truly mad, nightmarish scream
But screwing the pooch while a backside they smooch
To them seems like just a wet dream

Wherever they came from, who knows?
Incompetence in them just grows
They get us bombed stiff then they jump off a cliff
Demonstrating what already shows

We just hung a man in Iraq
Once gone, though, we can't get him back
Now without any rope, down the slippery slope
Our excuses get ever more slack

They talk of a "spike" and a "surge"
All to cover a fear and an urge
They've shot our last wad, now they've left it to "GAWD"
To figure out where next to splurge

They've had all the time that they need
To knock off the bullshit and screed
With their flat learning curve, they've one hell of a nerve
To demand more sick bodies to bleed

This ain't good and it's got to stop
Whatever they try at they flop
If left at the helm they'll just wreck the whole realm
In planting their dragon's teeth crop

So let us dismiss these vile men
Now mainly less rooster than hen
Before they can blow what at sundown they crow:
"Let's already do it again!"

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Beasts of My Land

2006-12-31T15:22:00.000-08:00

(after the style of George Orwell's "Beasts of England")

Praise the Lord and pass the bullet
Praise the Prophet; pass the rope
Crack the neck, then stretch and pull it
Praise religion; bury hope

Orwell said, "Revenge is Sour"
Not for those who tap the cask
Buy the bottles by the hour
Take a swig and pass the flask

Eye of newt and ear of frogskin
Dig a pit then set the stake
Chain the bear then throw the dogs in
Good Queen Bess will join the wake

Shoot the traitor; drown some witches
Burn the heretic real slow
Scratch the caveman where he itches
Basking in the good-feel glow

In the tavern, hold communion
Bread and wine a frenzied flood
Want to conquer? Spread disunion
Eat His flesh and drink His blood

"Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,"
Beasts of U.S.A. so fair,
Beast of Baghdad, Shiite firebrand:
Praise Moqtada, Bush, and Blair

Now without Saddam, who'll be next?
What excuse will you use now?
What transparent ruse or pretext
Will you make your sacred cow?

First tilt this way, then lean rightward
Back and forth, play both sides now
Throw them all in Bedlam's fright ward
They don't matter, anyhow

Place your sons upon the altar
Also daughters, friends, and wives
Parents, too -- and never falter
Praise your GAWD who feeds on lives

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2007

Moby Dork

2006-12-29T19:54:00.000-08:00

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

He fell asleep on watch and as he dozed
Some clever men decided to exploit
The glaring lapses that his naps exposed

So with some real panache and plans adroit
Some Saudis and their friends secured four planes
And flew them not to L.A. or Detroit

But into three big buildings’ window panes
Which brought collapse and loss of life extreme
A fact that never somehow quite explains

The subsequent developmental theme
Of mass destructive weaponry and such
That no one had designed into their scheme

Because they didn’t need so very much
Except for Dubya who required a crutch

You see, the fifteen Saudis dead and burned
Had shown with only some assistance sought
That sharpened stationary tools once turned

To service with some airplane tickets bought
Could neutralize a vast corrupt machine
Spread all around the globe with little thought

To what it could accomplish on the scene
When really needed for the home’s defense:
An absence and a negligence obscene

Presided over by a head so dense
That no amount of education known
Could teach to it the rudiments of sense

Thus only propaganda overblown
Could hope to mask the crime he would disown

Revealed as one unsuited to his job
Young Dubya had to make a choice and fast
For in his lap the fates would never lob

Another chance like this which couldn’t last
And so he hit upon a tried technique:
Into the future he’d project the past

Which might assuage the voters and their pique
By scaring them with what they’d just been through
As if it waited up ahead a week

And not already what the people knew
As part of history where them he’d failed
And for which failure he deserved the screw

A prospect at which Dubya truly quailed:
The only cure for that from which he ailed

He looked up in the sky and saw some dots
In whose unsteady twinkling he perceived
Disloyalty in cosmic symbol plots

Against the sun and moon which he believed
Existed but to mark his day and night
And so he sought to have the stars relieved

As mutineers against his Captain Blight
Who sailed the vessel Pipsqueak to its loss
For no good reason; simply out of spite

To demonstrate himself at last a boss
And not some tax deduction for dad’s friends
Polaris posing as the Southern Cross

He changes with no season till it ends:
A policy that pays no dividends

Traversing over often-covered ground
He names the starting-line anew then claims
That he has seen a path to the profound

A way to realize ambition’s aims:
A war to have itself so he can strut
Upon a stage too small for any names

That fifteen minutes doesn’t make a glut
Exhausting his one act, he plays a role
That ends in nothing flat and nothing but

A petty misdemeanor on parole
Which for a jaded audience of peers
Who benefit from all the loot he stole

Receives what he expects: some scripted cheers
While worthless-ticket holders offer jeers

The prefix “mono-“ hardly summarized
The artless mania that he portrayed
The image of “commander” that he prized

The pious son who knelt at night and prayed
To “higher” father-figures overhead
Who to his raving scant attention paid;

In whom a bored indifference he bred
Since he by habit good advice ignored
Not even Santa readying his sled

Could find a reindeer who could be implored
To make its mark and join a voyage damned
Because no navigator served aboard;

Because the crew with landlubbers was crammed
Then shut, recruitment’s door abruptly slammed

And so a ship of fools put out to sea
Equipped with rigging fit to sail a tub
A bathroom Bounty doomed to travesty

As Mr. Christian chose his toes to stub
Parading on the poop deck with no boots
His mission he proceeded soon to flub

Despite the sycophants in hired cahoots
Who swore to varnish each and every gaffe;
Who overlooked the raspberries and hoots

From those who clearly saw and had to laugh
As such pretentious Keystone Cops as these
Proposed themselves the ship of state to staff

To cruise the fires of Hell till they should freeze;
To reach the Moon and bring back its green cheese

Bullwinkle Moose would say, “This time for sure!”
And then would pull no rabbit from his hat
Before which act the squirrel would demur

By saying: “That trick never works!” and that
Persisting in such vain attempts to trick
Would only throw into the fire more fat

Which hardly made the Moose look deftly slick
Just only more inclined to postulate
That with another hat good luck might pick

A bunny, not the awful ungulate
Whose sharp hooves stomp magicians blue and black
Who heed not their own words: “Now concentrate ...”

As one more “new” “way” “forward” in Iraq
“Advances” us just two more old steps back

So sailed around in circles this lost raft
Propelled by swirls and eddies too severe
To navigate in such a ruined craft

That once had seemed impervious to fear
Bravado substituting for a chart
Now rudderless, off course, he can’t see clear

To bravely act a poorly written part
Except to brazenly puff out his chest
And claim “It’s not a science, but an art”

He fails in fact but says he did his best
Which in some private schools means “never mind”
And somehow translates to: “I passed the test”

For crony kids ordained to always find
Reward for nothing offered up in kind

This tale of Moby Dork has yet no end
For he who sought to wreak his righteous wrath
Upon a fleeing fish now cannot send

To know who placed the buoy into his path;
To tinkle, not to toll, him on his way
For one who simply could not do the math

No course-correcting calculations lay
Around for easy pickings floating by
Engulfed in fog, he saw no brighter day

But heard a chuckling ominously nigh
Not knowing he had reached his Brobdingnag
Where he, the tiny Lilliputian fly,

Would find the gods as wanton boys a drag
Who for their sport had cast him in their gag

For soon the erring boy would know the tune
Of Ahab’s lyrics written small and slim
For simple minds like his, a single rune

Compressed and summarized for such as him
Whose single concept, “war,” left only room
To entertain a prudish moral prim

Although he liked to say he felt no gloom
And slept without a nightlight, sound and well
Each day advanced him closer to his doom

As if bewitched by some enchanter’s spell
He bled his nation’s army thin and pale
While he devised more lies to try and sell

He bleached the white itself out of the whale
Which left transparency to tell his tale

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Flowers for Fallujah

2006-12-29T17:51:00.000-08:00

(Something from the past two years that seems to have held up fairly well as things have only gotten worse in American-occupied Iraq.)

"Flowers for Fallujah"

As I've said in the past and keep saying
I have sat through this movie before.
Why, I even was cast as an extra
Before being shown the door.

And I've tried to remember those lessons
That I purchased with so much pain
And not see America do once more
What I now see it doing again.

As the siege of a city begins to take shape
And the killing in earnest begins
I remember those times when the darkness closed `round
And men started repenting their sins.

Now a President's dove in and broken his neck
Jumping head first into a dry pool
And with horrified onlookers gazing in dread
He continues to snarl, spit, and drool.

"I will never get run out of town," he exclaims
Having entered at no one's request.
And having been asked once politely to leave
He behaves like an ill-tempered guest.

"Since I broke it, I own it," he says of Iraq.
But Iraq's not some gift he can give.
It's a country with people who like to pretend
That they know best how they want to live.

See, our President thinks like a pottery shill
And supposes that broken means owned.
But the people he's broken don't like it that much
And suggest that he just go get stoned.

Like those freeloading days back in college
When cheering meant parties and dope.
And nothing but brain cells got wasted and killed
And a people could still keep their hope.

"But I will not feel doubt," he exclaims to himself
And his mirror reflects his resolve.
"I will stand firm," he says as his knees start to quake
And his "courage" begins to dissolve.

See, he'll never admit that he made a mistake
And change policy once it's gone bad.
He would rather be wrong and keep talking with "GAWD"
Than be right and go talk to his dad.

`Cause his dad ain't got strength like "the Lord," don't you know
And he only consults with the best
Like those voices at night that advise him to dream
And leave governing up to the rest.

And George Tenet told Dubya about the "slam dunk"
Which in basketball terms means "a cinch."
Like whenever the FBI measures a mile
And the CIA calls it an inch.

So those weapons we heard of that meant us such harm
Didn't really exist in the fog.
Just because he hung "vicious beast" signs on his gate
Doesn't mean that Saddam had a dog.

Yes, our spies sure know how to keep hidden
All the stuff that nobody should know
So they stamp it TOP SECRET and file it away
In a place where nobody can go.

Thus we keep seeing trees and not forests
And we keep seeing forests, not trees
While the young GI sprawls in the dust of Iraq
With his guts spilling over his knees

And the young GI dies when her tin car explodes
As she drives through a city in strife
Leaving only her unit and family to grieve
At the loss of another young life.

Still, the man in the White House he struts and he frets
With his hour on the stage nearly done.
To this idiot player the tale signifies
That the sound and the fury are one.

"We are here, `cause we're here, `cause we're here, `cause we're here,"
Goes the slogan from Vietnam days.
And we surely can't leave, because leaving would mean
That we'd found our way out of the maze.

Now, the Lord of all Love told young Dubya to smite,
So the boy smote Saddam on the head
But those ingrate Iraqis they smote Dubya back
And now thousands of GIs are dead.

The returns they diminish so quickly
When a billion or more you must pay
To destroy what the "bad guy" rebuilds in an hour
And makes use of the following day.

Like we learned in Vietnam - as some of us did,
How the debt into billions it runs
`Till the good folks at home have to give up their butter
Or else begin eating their guns.

Then the choices arise that no one wants to face
Because somebody's ox will get gored.
Politicians, you see, hate to give up their own
When they'd rather be looting your hoard.

So the tax cuts go draining the money away
`Till the last dollar's taken to flight.
Once again it's the rich ones who've started a war
And then run off to let the poor fight.

And Tom Ridge goes on flashing those color alerts
While the public works mowing the lawn.
"What, another attack of the `credible' type?
You mean `credulous,' don't you?" they yawn.

But the voters can rest in their comfort and ease
And continue like sheep in their flocks.
While the young GI dies in the dirt of Iraq
And comes home in a flag-covered box.

See, the "enemy" lives in that hell of a place
And, in fact, it is all that he owns
So he'll fight there and die there as long as he must
`Till the last flesh has left the last bones.

You can pound all the buildings to rubble.
You can kill all that can't run away.
You can kill and keep killing and then kill some more,
But the hunger for freedom will stay.

In America freedom means bondage.
In America fools run the show.
In America no one knows what the words mean
When the word-magic says, "stop" means "go."

And the Newspeak keeps pouring from out of the mouths
Of the spokesmen for nation and town.
Until sov'reign means slav'ry and choosing means chains
And swimming means freedom to drown.

So then keep them in darkness and feed them on shit
If you wish for your mushrooms to grow
And so shoveling shit's now the plan of the day
In America: last place to know.

But the Truth will come `round in the fullness of time
Like the rough slouching beast at the door.
Who keeps knocking and knocking and won't go away
`Till you've fed it your children, and more.

But the children don't matter, because as we know
The word "children" means "their kids" not ours.
So the "Draft" doesn't scare us because it means "them"
And not us -- so let's just tend our flowers.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

The Misfortune Teller

2006-12-22T17:56:00.000-08:00

(After the style of the traditional Mad Song, "Tom O'Bedlam")

You can wish and wildly wonder
How best might you receive it?
The tale that you tell, as it fits so well
In the end you won't believe it
I have got a shiny mirror
In which yourself will see you
Reflections that glide on the other side
From your right your left will free you

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Any dime's worth you can offer
For you know it's true, all depends on you
Not the coin placed in the coffer

You have done some things you shouldn't
As any man will tell you
One look in the glass, it will come to pass
That you'll know what doom befell you
Have a look at your misfortune
The kind that never misses
A fortunate one who has come undone
Should have shunned Medusa’s kisses

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
For a penny or a nickel
As you know for true what they’ll do to you
Whom you’ve placed in such a pickle

If a crystal ball you've come for
You found the wrong location
The hole in the floor tells you what's in store
As the truth is my vocation
If it hurts, you've got it coming
Your karma you've acquired
From things that you did you have run and hid
But the weight has made you tired

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Any phrase or any sentence
For you know for a fact, that it’s just an act
If you never seek repentance

In the coffin of your craving
You'll find the feast and famine
You'll know of its rot when the dirty spot
You exhume and then examine
In his bunker your Rasputin
Some “enemies” he picks on
As the proper price of a sacrifice
To the shrine of Richard Nixon

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
For a necessary breather
For you know that’s passed, what you can’t recast
Not for sale or purchase, either

In the ages three in number
The present, past, and future
The buddhas appear to dispel the fear
Of the surgeon and his suture
To remove the arrow promptly
And wisely stop infection
Beats knowing the source of the arrow's force
But requires some introspection

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Look inside at clause and phrases
For your siren song has some spelling wrong
Like your plan to leave in “phases”

Like the Japanese amnesia:
The seventh of December
Once out of Iraq, you will not look back
For you won't want to remember
Like in Southeast Asia also
You couldn't bear to lose it
Once lost, though, you found it was worthless ground
Now you wonder who would choose it

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Any paragraph or sermon
For your “living room” you have used a “boom!”
Like the good and loyal German

It's begun to look a pattern
You first jump in then wallow
Once firing, you claim that you plan to aim
For the lesson you won't swallow
See the syndrome of your sickness
The symptoms of your sleeping
The signs of a boy who must have his toy
Or he'll throw a fit of weeping

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
For a lecture or a session
For a syndrome new you will need a crew
Dedicated to regression

See the lines that crease your forehead
The scalp that flakes and itches
See the rug that thins as your many sins
Come to nest inside your britches
Like the lice that crawl and vex you
The crabs they sideways skitter
While your albatross with its dead-weight loss
Makes a necklace with no glitter

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Any disinfecting grammar
For some syntax good might impress the wood
Like a nail hit with a hammer

See the chicken hawks around you
That cluck and glare and lay eggs
Do they need a boost coming home to roost?
Is the question that this day begs
Like the lemmings you stampeded
The rats now jump ship faster
With your little pail you had better bail
Or you’ll sink in your disaster

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
Some connecting prepositions
For a “to” or a “from” or a “by” or an “at”
Should confirm your superstitions

Have I shown you this for nothing?
Has any concept sunk in?
Does your fluffy head like some doughy bread
Need a glass of milk to dunk in?
Would a hot bath make it better?
With rubber duckies floating
You could try your luck passing on the buck
To the ones now grimly gloating

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
For some schadenfreude smirking
For a “one last surge” won’t relieve the urge
Of the duties you like shirking

In the thrift store he’s a cast-off
An honest, worthless leaving
A marginal man; ninety-nine-cent plan
But he’s safe from need of thieving
Unlike connected cronies
This citizen you’ve squandered
Since he has no cash to inflate your stash
And no money has he laundered

Come stay for a time, for a word or a rhyme
For the crime in which you revel
Down in Dante’s Hell they’ve reserved a cell
On your very own tenth level

A Munificent Travesty

2006-12-22T17:39:00.000-08:00

(After the style of Robert Browning's "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came")

Upon a building’s rubble he once stood
Then raised a megaphone before his lips
And sent a message in the form of quips
To those he said had done his land no good
He would, he swore, avenge the neighborhood
On those who took advantage of his slips

He maybe thought that he would strike some fear
Into the perpetrators dead below
Some corpses burnt to cinders, smoking slow
Who one would think could hardly see or hear
His threats to kill someone that they held dear:
Identities that he could never know

Yet, still, the ones who did the awful deed
Had Saudi friends – and well-connected, too
Who from the coop straightforward homeward flew
No questions asked of those whom Dubya freed
A bull-horn set to mouth with all mad speed:
“This child will get Saddam Hussein,” he blew

The child apprentice knight errant set out
To prove his mettle in a grand crusade
While posing boldly; stern and unafraid
Advice from wiser men he chose to flout
Believing in a “higher” father’s clout
His earthly dad’s renown he soon unmade

In thrall to visions fed him in the dark
By courtiers who whispered in his ear
He thought himself the point upon a spear
Embarked upon an epic Sunday lark
Deployed to vanquish picnics in the park
On cakewalks such as this, what fool felt fear?

Somehow, he’d got his hands upon a toy
A power dark and dangerous to flaunt
But even worse if loosed upon a jaunt:
A game of chance played by a little boy
He threw the deadly dice; consumed in joy,
Both enemies and friends he chose to taunt

Whatever words he spoke, the press would buy
Although not worth the ink and paper cost
Whatever thoughts he gained he quickly lost
His “mind” as evanescent as a sigh
The word came down from editors on high:
“Portray him as the dew and not the frost”

So, unexamined outside or within
Child Dubya took to walking while asleep
Commander of his clueless castle keep
He sallied forth, his conquest to begin
With trumpet fanfare urging him to win
He rode up to a canyon wide and deep

This great depression had an entry sign
Beside which carving sat a lonely wretch
Who cautioned that an act of faith would stretch
Good fortune past its outer limit line
Advising reason rather less malign,
The wraith read warnings scratched into the etch:

“A child unto the darkened power came
Unbidden but attracted nonetheless
Too innocent of strife to bear the stress
Too inexperienced to know the game
Who entered with excuses long and lame
And smelled some blood – of whom he could not guess”

There at decision’s fork, he barely stayed
To ridicule the one who said “Go back!
Or turn aside for knowledge that you lack
Or else prepare to learn where you have strayed
Into those traps for you that Fate’s arrayed
Too late retreat; too early to attack”

Child Dubya to the crippled beggar lied
With every word that in his mouth congealed
Yet in the wretch’s glance he saw revealed
His own bedraggled bogus baleful pride
Reflecting back at him a taunting snide
That showed what he had from himself concealed

What opportunity lay here at hand!
What challenge for the world’s self-mocking elf!
No weaponry not stocked upon the shelf
No army not awaiting his command
No chance of any needed reprimand
Command thus issued orders to itself

In all the world he had no puerile peer
No younger child nor older fool compared
No losing prospect loomed and so he dared
To sail -- without a star by which to steer
Aboard, a blind Parsee to serve as seer --
With fluttered sails and shivered timbers bared

The sun came up just so that he could see
But then went down for feeling hardly used
In black of day he saw with circuits fused
No breakers tripped, and so the amps ran free
Which boiled his brain into a fricassee:
Stewed meat cut small like those whom he abused

The night came on so he could get more rest
Still feeling tired from all his daytime naps
Untroubled by his military flaps
With all the answers, he still failed the test
Despite all that his “higher” father blessed:
Like deadbeat sons who lose at cards and craps

With sunrise and with sundown impotent
To signal “charge” or sound a wise retreat
He lost a victory but won defeat
The moment he decided to relent
To every wastrel instinct that he spent
By pouring gas on flames to make more heat

The earth and sky and waters gathered round
To cheer him on, as his advisor said
Although his thought unwoven had no thread
No warp or woof to weave a fabric sound
His artless tapestry fell to the ground
For having neither rudder, wings, nor head

“Now stab Saddam Hussein!” he heard a voice
From somewhere undisclosed yet nearby still;
“And then upon his folk impose our will!
Call this ‘democracy’ and offer choice:
A Cadillac, Mercedes, or Rolls Royce?
To those who send the others off to kill”

”Those tolling bells that signal the alarm?
Pay them no mind for what do others know?
Who never had the chance this much to blow
Or millions such as we can bring to harm
Or billions we can squander on a farm
That never any profit has to show!”

“Like Ishmael and Queequeg on the town
We have no cause to pay them any heed
These Tom O’Bedlams out to score some feed
These crippled, mad Elijahs always frown
And warn us that with Ahab we might drown
Just syndrome-selling sailors gone to seed”

So down into the murky gloom he slid
Ignoring veterans of such a march
Who pointed to a cave door not an arch
Who saw the trashcan rather than its lid
Who knew the “bad guys” hadn’t run but hid
Who’d seen their friends laid out as stiff as starch

Yet childish Dubya sought a holy grail
Which he had heard lay free for him to find
But which instead made him its grist to grind
So he “decided” he would flop and flail
While “bad guys” poured some salt upon his tail
Which left him flightless; caged in his own bind

At any noble quest, he’d not succeed
Valhalla’s maids pick others from the field
Who fought the losing fight but did not yield
As much as him who gave in to his need
To mouth a motto, making it a screed
Employing symbol soldiers as his shield

Behind the sacred aegis of the troops
Whose nameless features saved for him his face
He found that they had marked for him a place
A sanctuary wherein he rode loops
Around on his bicycle through some hoops;
Where he could disappear without a trace

So as the wars he started fiercely blazed
He grew more insignificant each day
As his incompetence came into play
When seen in public forums badly dazed
He seemed outright and frankly simply crazed
His bafflement loomed large and on display

He kept insisting that he held the reins
No power had, he said, fell from his grasp
And yet events could only make one gasp
To witness all the petty, paltry pains
He took pretending that he felt no strains
As others tried to save him in their clasp

The bugle of the cavalry he heard
Sent on a mission, his bare ass to save
Yet this would not relieve but just deprave
Humiliating help has never cured
A drowning feline rescued by a bird
Who’d rule in Hell before be Heaven’s slave

Content with thoughts of predecessors who
In death long since had earned a fair regard,
No matter how he trashed the playground yard,
Child Dubya just supposed that he would, too;
And won with his wild antics no canard
Just Truth which will forever turn the screw

He’d sought a vast dark tower to accost
Whose terrors he proposed to vanquish quick
With slogans from which he could have his pick
In nightmare tempests soon he turned and tossed
Urged on to more mistakes by one he bossed
Left only with more endless wounds to lick

A travesty of such munificence!
So generous in its monstrosity!
A heaping helping of a perfidy;
Betrayal of a trusting innocence;
Converted now to just incontinence
The duped now see their own stupidity

Now who hurts worse: the liar or his sap?
As those fooled many times much more than once
Have now to face the corner as a dunce
And sit upon a stool with clownish cap
While knowing who has fed them worthless crap
And will again, as will all lying runts

For who has cleaned the leopard of his spots?
Why would success at lying make it cease?
No charges filed? No prisoner release!
Why think of spurting blood that never clots?
Or any corpse that in its shroud now rots?
Who now will dare demand a chance for peace?

Child Dubya to the Dark Power came and cried:
“At last, I can command while in my briefs
And steal not just like other tyrant thiefs
But more because the ones who’ve fought and died
And those upon whose freedoms I have spied
Like all good injuns, need commanding chiefs”

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Buffaloed Girl

2006-12-21T22:09:00.000-08:00

(somewhat after the traditional song of a similar name)

Buffaloed girl, won't you come out tonight?
Bask in your fright; hide in plain sight.
Buffaloed girl don't you put up a fight;
Just dance to the right with the goons!

Buffaloed girl, don't you burn any flags;
Marry some fags; count body bags.
Buffaloed girl, wrapped in riches not rags,
Just keep raking in those doubloons!

Buffaloed girl, send our troops to Iraq!
Then leave them there! Don't bring them back!
Buffaloed girl, cover George Bush's back,
And scrape up a few more platoons!

Buffaloed girl, just stay out of the fray.
Keep your mouth shut! Keep making hay!
Buffaloed girl, while the cat is away
Just keep playing mice with buffoons.

Buffaloed girl, don’t you hear the troops cry?
Wounded for wrongs; dead for a lie
Buffaloed girl, look in everyone’s eye
And then soil your own pantaloons

Buffaloed girl, under Lieberman’s wing
Saving his job, that's the main thing
Buffaloed girl, you and Holy Joe sing
The duet of right-wing spittoons

Buffaloed girl, rail at video games
Focus group that; spout the right frames
Buffaloed girl, don’t you name any names
Just save children from their cartoons

Buffaloed girl, take a “listening” tour
If you don’t know; if you’re not sure
Buffaloed girl, voters like their fake “pure”
Like war debt that simply balloons

Buffaloed girl, when it counted you hid
Don’t try to lie. That’s what you did
Buffaloed girl, Dubya made you his kid
When you bought the crap that he croons

Buffaloed girl, your irrelevance mounts
Even in small, measured amounts
If “it” takes a village, by all your accounts
Then take “it” to Mars and its moons

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

A Boobie Murphy's Flaw

2006-12-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

(From the in-progress epic of post-linguistic Comparative Misanthropology: "Fernando Po, U.S.A." )

He had the choice to not do this
But did it anyway
He had the choice to do it right
But chose to go astray
He had his chance to leave but then
Decided he would stay

He had the chance to choose someone
To manage his affairs
But got involved himself and chose
To split Iraqi hairs
He swore to save our country but
He wound up wrecking theirs

Their army and their government
He told to take a hike
He spoke of what he wanted but
Got what he didn't like
Each increase in the violence,
He called a little "spike"

He steered straight for the iceberg while
He swore he'd stay the course
Like Reagan playing cowboy, he
Sat backwards on his horse
Then found he had to float some loans
For Chinese to endorse

He said he would decide upon
Decisions he would make
He pledged real fiscal honesty
But wound up on the take
Ersatz in his sincerity,
He only looked more fake

He lied each passing minute till
The seconds' hand got tired
He praised unto the Heavens those
Embarrassments he fired
(Some makers of soup sandwiches
For kitchen help he'd hired)

He claimed he needed no one's help,
Then found he had to beg
He tried to act the tough-guy part
But really broke a leg
With chopsticks then he tried to pick
The bone out of the egg

He called himself "decider" which
In his mind made him strong
Once he decided, other folks --
He thought -- would go along
With no choice left but one, he'd still
Decide to do it wrong

He did so many damned things wrong
Since damned things he could do
He promised to do little good
But much for some damned few:
A lowered expectation since
About the age of two

He spoke of "crisp" decisions like
A salad knife or fork
Or how to differentiate
Some hamburger from pork
"Way-cool" decision making of
The kind made by a dork

He chose to take a chance on choice
And gambled with the dice
He labored like a mountain and
Brought forth some tiny mice
Then doubled-down the dead so he
Could lose not once but twice

He asked for no advice but still
He got some nonetheless
His "gut," he said, had told him he
Should still prefer to guess
And so he chose to flip a coin --
And made a bloody mess

His "higher father" told him stuff
That no one else could hear
His earthly father heard of this
And shed a bitter tear
That Big-Spook/Joseph cuckold thing
Made other things quite clear

He recognized no limit to
The credit card accounts
He thought that blood and money came
In infinite amounts
Which proved that when he weighed a life,
It didn't weigh an ounce

While citizens had nightmares when
He tried and failed to spell
He wanted to assuage our fears
That he did not sleep well
(The belfry in his head had bats
But not a single bell)

He journeyed to the future and
Came back with his report
He told us that when we were dead,
We'd get his last retort
Implying we should wait till then
And not his rule abort

He tried to go too fast, which meant
He managed to stand still
He swore that he would liberate
Which really meant he'd kill
A Boobie Murphy's Flaw, he can
Go wrong -- and so he will

The people only can decide,
And this he truly dreads
For he has heard of Romanovs
And rolling czarist heads
The just deserts for those who chose
To tear whole lands to shreds

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Boobie Bozo Bellicosity

2006-12-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

(From the in-progress epic of post-linguistic Comparative Misanthropology: "Fernando Po, U.S.A.")

The creepy Joseph Lieberman
And Mad-Dog John McCain
Teamed up to send more troops abroad
And from their bodies drain
Whatever blood they hadn't lost
To bring these two some gain

These sorry Boobie Senators
Had bet on the wrong dog
Who couldn't hunt a single wart
Upon a single frog
Not even if the little toad
Sold roadmaps to his bog

King George the Worst had suckered them
Into a war gone wrong
He promised them a codpiece but
Delivered not a thong
Which left their little weenies shrunk
And hardly looking "strong"

Exposed as dimwit demagogues
Of evanescent heft
These weightless-wonder warriors
Got robbed by their own theft
They charged off to the right when all
The others had turned left

They thought that wooden-headedness
Made virtue of the vain;
Hobgoblins of consistency,
These little minds made plain
That tiny statesmen such as them
Seek shelter in the slain

The Theory of Contrariness
Obsessed this Ho and Hum
As Tweedle is to twaddle, John
Played "Dee" and Joe played "Dum"
And battled for the rattle of
Their silly little plum

Like sponsoring "amendments" that
No court would not strike down
They thought it safe to advocate
More GI lives to drown
Since ice would form in Hell before
That plot left Tinsel Town

This shouting at the howling wind
They thought made them look brave
For offering more sacrifice
That others wished to save
Which only made them seem like boys
Not old enough to shave

The fanboy fascist treehouse branch
On which they sit and saw
Has signs that read "No Girls Allowed!"
As if this lays down law
A double-dare for gravity
To prove both shock and awe

A feckless fruit of faithlessness
They offer up to eat
Which claims that all the dead and gone
Require still more dead meat
An appetite both ravenous
And never quite replete

This hunger fed will only grow
As nothing can appease
The lust of petty princes for
Some other lives to seize:
Laid down in mortuaries where
Upon a slab they freeze

Some time in solitary had
Left Mad-Dog John insane
And dedicated to the task
Of bringing others pain
His martial virtues he supposed
This way he could regain

He'd dropped some bombs, then crashed into
The victims of his crime
Who then insisted that he pay
By doing some hard time
Which only left him more convinced
Of war as peace sublime

But Holy Moralizin' Joe,
Likudnik Lieberman,
Had other countries on his mind
Whose interested plan
Required some young Americans
To hit the shitty fan

Not satisfied with subsidies
Extorted from his own
Ol' weepin' Joe would gladly throw
More death at what he's sown
Already, with some dead GIs
Not quite yet fully grown

Yet even as no Zionists
Patrol the Baghdad streets
Still Holy Joe would have GIs
Lie stiff beneath the sheets
So he can beat the drum for the
Israeli tune he bleats

By pounding hapless foreigners
Mad-Dog and Holy Joe
Sought each to serve his purposes
Through "thoughts" both bad and slow
Which demonstrated heedlessness
Of life they cannot know

Thus Mad-Dog John and Holy Joe,
The Boobie Bozo twin,
Set out to double-down the dead:
A blackjack bet on sin;
By losing even more GIs,
They thought that they could "win"

Of course, those dead Iraqis have
No role to play in this
Except to serve as extras in
A sick nocturnal bliss:
A senile wet-dream; two limp dicks
Too old to barely piss

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Boobie Listening Tours

2006-12-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

(From the in-progress epic of post-linguistic Comparative Misanthropology: "Fernando Po, U.S.A.")

He speaks of swells and "surges" like
They have some potency
To leave impressions in a mind
In jail for vagrancy
He listens without hearing and
He looks but doesn't see

But still he puts on quite a show
Of looking like he looks
Like those who run for office while
Distributing some books
Designed to sell celebrity:
A line with barbs and hooks

He also likes to have it look
Like he is listening
While on a tour to have him seen
Appearing as a king
Who cares for what his subjects think
When he cares no such thing

Appearing at appearances
He speaks to utter sounds
Which noisemaking activity
His empty self surrounds
A comment on humanity
Beneath and out of bounds

In post-linguistic times like these
The cattle prod now serves
To jolt and stun intelligence
That normally observes
So from the sight of painful truth
The Boobie conscience swerves

It hurts too much to see no thing
Where something seems to be:
Transparent apparitions like
Those deserts in the sea;
Mirages in a mind made hot
By bogus imagery

Performing their experiments
On captive focus groups
The word magicians seek to find
The kinks inside the loops
Of wires crossed up in circuits that
Make Boobies jump through hoops

Some sequences of noises or
Some spell-marks on the page
Can often boil some Boobie brains
And put them in a rage
Inducing executions of
Some felon on the stage

And posing in some certain way
Drives Boobies 'round in ruts
Some glandular secretions seep
From heads to Boobie butts
Till "take a load off" means relief
From pressure on the nuts

To hold the arms akimbo and
Stare sternly into space
With nothing recognizable
As thought upon the face
Moves blocks of demographic votes
To shame the human race

By placing in high office one
Who knows no rhyme or rule,
Discredited disciples of
Dick Nixon made a tool:
A propaganda catapult
Aimed squarely at the fool

Repeating repetition till
The brain begins to numb
Shows method in a madness meant
To make the Boobies dumb
Techniques to which the Boobies proved
They'd willingly succumb

No study of the language helped
For Boobies would deride
Attempts by English teachers to
Some overview provide
"It's just semantics," Boobies jeered,
So meaning simply died

"You leave those kids alone!" they brayed,
Like donkeys in the pen
"Why we've been speaking language since
Before the age of ten;
And Uncle Jim-Bob never had
To tell us where from when"

"It all depends," the Walrus said,
"On what you mean by that;
Not what you mean when you say 'is,'
But what you mean by 'fat'
Does 'fat' mean 'dumb and happy' or
By heart attack laid flat?"

Or does the use of expletive
Constructions queer the game
By puffing up bad grammar with
The empty and the lame
With things that look like nouns and verbs
Deserving all the blame?

"It is just what it is," he claimed
"I said just what I said.
You'll know just what I mean some day
Long after we're all dead;
Which means you've just allowed me to
Evacuate your head"

"Hee Haw! Hee Haw! I fooled you good!
Now don't you feel ashamed
To realize that I know what
To hit where I have aimed?
And all the time I skated while
Some innocent you blamed!"

"That's got to chap your ass, I know;
But here's the better part!
Now that you rightly feel betrayed
I'll demonstrate the art
Of rubbing in the lesson so
Get ready: let us start …"

"You can't admit how easily
I took you for a ride
I've got the key to you and that
Has gotten me inside
Down where the lizard lurks
With all your vanity and pride"

"The mammal cortex in your skull
Can sometimes work or not
Depending on the use it gets
Or if it goes to rot
Assuming without questioning
The Boobie monoglot"

"You speak one language, so you think;
Although too loosely used,
A word like "think" can only show
The organ you've abused
Combining neural nets into
One neuron tightly fused"

"But, anyway, the Carpenter
Has made of me a dunce
Who blows your brains out endlessly
Without reloading once
A single-bullet sloganeer
Who shills for whom he fronts"

"This makes me look the cynic, sure,
And not the simple sod
That I portray on TV sets
Before the gawking clod;
But put a flag behind me and
The Boobies think I'm GAWD!"

"Like Oz behind his curtain, Dick
Designs the things I say
Projecting me commanding all
My statues made of clay
Who do just what they're told and will
Until their dying day"

“I could have grown up poor which would
Have put me to the test
I could have gone to serve in war
Like many of the best
But since I chose my parents well,
I got to take a rest”

“I know it sounds unsportsmanlike
To rip off those in prayer
With heads pressed to the pavement and
Their asses in the air;
But what thief could refuse to lift
A wallet here and there?

“I didn’t make the world this way;
I take it as it comes
I only set them marching off
By beating on the drums
That means I get to eat the cake
While they fight over crumbs”

"Thus ends the lesson, Boobies, so
Go home and take a nap
You'll soon forget and then I'll have
You eating from my lap
The usual arrangement for
Dispensing you your crap"

So as the tour continued, George
And You-Know-Her alike
Pretended that they gave a shit
And spoke about a "spike"
A "surge" implying "more" troops now
Like fingers in the dike

Just why the dike had sprung those leaks
The touring Boobies knew
But since they poked the holes themselves
Their fear of flooding grew
How could they get to higher ground
Among the chosen few?

The answer lay in moving fast
Creating quite a stir
A spasm of activity
Resulting in a blur
A cyclone storm of bullshit meant
To mask the flying fur

Appearances deceive, they say,
Thus more and more appear
To tour deceptively in hopes
This way they'll dodge the spear
Now cocked, and aimed, and set to throw
At their buck-naked rear

Transparent touring two years out
From when someone might care
Has absolutely nothing much
To do with burning air
Or bodies piled up in the morgues
'Cause we went "over there"

Which sort of makes it all too plain
Why daily hundreds die
It all comes back to Boobies who
Go fish while others fry
Our "leaders" take for granted that
We'll wait for their next lie

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Boobie Last Chance Scenarios

2006-12-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

(From the in-progress epic of post-linguistic Comparative Misanthropology: "Fernando Po, U.S.A.")

The Boobies of America
Designed a warfare state
Or rather, simply let it grow
Till it became their fate
They never knew what laid them low
Till it was far too late

The ones who fed on Fear Itself
Required a bogeyman
To terrify the children so
That they from shadows ran
And never turned to face the fraud
Sold them as Heaven's Plan

They conjured Symbol Soldier as
The blindfold they would need
To keep from view their appetites
In all their naked greed --
Misfortune-telling Boobies found
That none would pay them heed

These prophets without honor in
No land except their own
Would chant Cassandra's message to
The power on the throne
Which simply disregarded truth
As old news overblown

George Washington told Boobies that
They shouldn't get entrapped
By clever foreign puppets who
Had Boobies clearly mapped
As erstwhile puppeteers who played
With string until they snapped

But Boobies loved to fondle rope
With which they'd often wrung
Confessions from some Boobie necks
And witches highly strung
Until the executioners
From their own gallows hung

Yet Alexander Hamilton
Said he had found a way
To muzzle standing armies with
Too much to do and say
Just meet at two-year periods
And cut off needless pay

But in some intervals of years
With peace supremely blessed
The Boobies failed to concentrate
On demagogues obsessed
With reasserting tendencies
That always recrudesced

Dwight Eisenhower told the tale
As he walked out the door
Not that it seemed to bother him
When he patrolled the floor
What wisdom Boobie statesmen speak
When few care any more

Embarrassed by the Soviets
Who put a man in space
The Boobies of America
Found egg upon their face
It hurt them so to find themselves
In solid second place

So then for once in their career
The Boobies acted smart
They saw the need to educate
In science, math, and art
Then sprinted to the Moon so fast
That few had seen them start

But bored with doing something grand
The Boobies looked inside
To find an emptiness that called
For bragging, bumbling pride:
Reactionary panic geared
To conquer and divide

The Boobies loved to spout clichés
Connecting up the dots
A simple game that they had played
Since they were little tots
Assuming as they did that this
Revealed some hidden plots

The warfare welfare monolith
And its expanding girth
Exhausted all resources in
The nation of their birth
Till Boobies neither knew the price
Nor what the beast was worth

From North and South no threat appeared
To East and West: just fish
The waters and the weak inspired
No Boobie death to wish
No danger left the Boobie kings
With no real dirt to dish

In terror at apparent Peace
The Boobie princes bawled
They'd longed to play Napoleon
Since on the rug they crawled
Their lust for misadventure made
Them jump each time it called

They said they needed "one last chance"
Just like the one before
Akin to others they called "last"
Till "last" became a bore:
A muddled Boobie meme that had
No meaning anymore

They say they'll need just "one last chance"
Before they need the next
Yet all of their "last chances" leave
Them in a funk and vexed
Unsure of why their "last chance" schemes
Just leave them more perplexed

They make great show of movement that
Retraces covered ground
Moonwalking on to Mars they claim
The answer to have found:
A way to blast off into space
Without making a sound

So as the last becomes the next
Before the last next last
The Boobies start to go around
In circles very fast
And spiral down the drainpipe from
The present to the past

The "last chance" moron monarch meant
To eat the cake he'd have
If given one last chance he swore
Some glaciers he would calve
To wound the world with endless war
That no known grief could salve

The chief commanding Boobie belched
And promised he would show
Some "victory" for all his waste
Just when, we'd some day know
Most likely when above his corpse
The graveyard grasses grow

It's all the same to him, it seems
No urgency applies
He hasn't seen his friends made food
For swarms of hungry flies
Or all his relatives laid down
Where even darkness cries

The ghoul's own gift he gives himself
And this he gladly gets:
Some slaughter on his plate piled high
With nothing he regrets
He sees Pandora's demons as
Domesticated pets

And so before he dines again
On one more "last chance" meal
The Boobie in command decides
What he intends to steal
From off the menu of the poor
Whose nightmares he's made real

A cell without a nucleus:
Some clueless cytoplast
Metabolizing meaning like
Assistants that he gassed
Commander Boobie's next plan reeks
Of what he's eaten last

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Consistent Hobgoblins

2006-12-13T00:56:00.000-08:00

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

Adored of tiny statesmen and divines
And often of philosophers as well
A foolish false consistency opines

That on a change of course we should not dwell
For as the iceberg lies just straight ahead
To spin the wheel would turn into the swell

And miss the chance to sink and wind up dead
Which every seasick passenger prefers
To spending one more minute in the head

At thoughts of which the queasy stomach spurs
Revolted retching on the deck and rail
The crazy captain from this scene infers

That straight into the ice he'd rather sail
Than see his ship a stinking vomit pail

Some wise men tried to give him sane advice
But since he hadn’t asked for it, he frowned
He wished play with fire, not deal in ice

And so with burning hair his brow was crowned
Upon the flaming lakes that he had lit
The grinning goblins leaped and danced around

In celebration of his lack of wit
That them had loosed upon a prostrate land
To do as awfully as they saw fit

Precisely the reverse of what he planned
In irony, as ice will quench the fire
His only choice left him no other hand

Like Hobson’s single horse let out for hire
He picked the road that led from worse to dire

Consistently convinced of his success
This wooden-headed statesman’s little mind
Could see no wrong in stupid stubbornness

Nor could he any flaw or defect find
In policies that caused a world to blanche
As shoelaces he knotted in a bind

The bleeding of his troops he could not stanch
And off upon assistants he would fob
The work that he would bring home from the ranch

Which let him take vacation from the job
Whose lightest duties seemed a heavy toil
The schizophrenic double-thinking slob

Upon the waters spread a slick of oil
And with a blowtorch brought it to a boil

He said once he was dead we'd get it right
But since we've got it right, that makes him dead
Which puts some pointed teeth into the bite

Of claims that he has nothing in his head
For whispers softly entering his ears
Come out his mouth with little really said

And what goes in his eyes soon disappears
With no connection made to lights inside
A starless void through which an echo steers

A slope down which the changing stories slide
A lifeless bulb left plugged into a lamp
A disconnected battery that died

For never charging up a single amp
He now deserves his own "rejected" stamp

But Emerson said also that the book
Is made by its good reader if it's good
For he will find with practiced, piercing look

The monk or engine underneath the hood
Identities deposited like gold
For him the author clearly understood

Who knows how to discover and take hold
Of independent thought which plainly sees
The one who never purchased; only sold

Who only borrowed; never paid the fees
Who never once auditioned for the part
Or knew of truths and their discoveries

Who always put the horse behind the cart
No equal, but a lesser mind and heart

Yet still the thousands die because of two
A pair to which no hand should ever draw
Who covered up the necessary clue

To what they meant by terms like shock and awe
Or shuck and jive: the old Vaudeville soft-shoe
Who with their war our pockets pick and paw

While all the time the troops pass in review
Deploying once again to stall for time
As witches on the heath concoct a brew

For Gollum and Macbeth, a riddle rhyme
Fortelling only honest, trifling sums
Betraying consequences more sublime

The goblins sneer and smirk with bleeding gums
Consistently they moon us with their bums

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Slaughterhouse-Two

2006-12-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

The rancid, ahistorical regime of Sheriff Dick and Deputy Dubya has now become completely subjunctive; or, as Tweedledee would say: "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't." Got that?

Unable to recognize, admit, or engage present reality deriving from unforced past error, the defunct duo has gone again and again to the future where nothing has happened yet so anyone may freely "report" back to us their time-travelling adventures as if what they only imagine has actually taken place. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, "If ....."

The other day, for instance, George of the Bungle slammed into another rhetorical tree, so to speak, when he "became unstuck in time" (as Kurt Vonnegut said of his fictional character Billy Pilgrim) and told us that "after I'm dead, they'll get it right." As usual, he did not pause to ponder the implications of such a remark, but I immediately grasped its true significance and began another "exploratory" (as You-Know-Her would say) poem with:

He said once he was dead we'd get it right
But since we've got it right, that makes him dead
Which puts some pointed teeth into the bite

Of claims that he has nothing in his head
For whispers softly entering his ears
Come out his mouth with little really said

And what goes in his eyes soon disappears
With no connection made to lights inside
A starless void through which an echo steers

A slope down which the changing stories slide
A lifeless bulb left plugged into a lamp
A disconnected battery that died

For never charging up a single amp
He now deserves his own "rejected" stamp

Dead man walking. Dead man talking. Dead man squawking. Dead man balking. Dead man dead. Yes, I think we've got this wrong man right.

So, now for the necessary replacements. No one should keep dead and worthless employees on the payroll if that means bankrupting the firm. Sometimes even Republicans get tired of the owner's two catatonic sons stinking up the family business boardroom. So, do Dick and Dubya, the Slaughterhouse-Two, go quietly like good little corporate "team players," or do they want to make their exit as messy and midieval as their ruinous, rancorous reign? In the interest of efficiency and economy, then, if not of justice and prudence, we have to make some cuts where the rotten deadwood starts -- like at the top of the prevaricating pyramid.

Trust Billy Pilgrim on this one. He has seen the future and for some reason having to do with red-faced embarrassment, it contains no mention whatsoever of the Slaughterhouse-Two: Richard Bruce Cheney and George W. Bush -- just like those Japanese schoolbooks that whitewash the whole self-inflicted disaster of the Pacific War by saying, in effect: "Japan somehow became unpopular; and then some bad things happened; but the future looks so much better now." Really. The future feels humiliated that we happened, so it has thought best not to mention us at all. The land that forgot time -- again -- thus becomes the land that time has two truly bad and bogus reasons to forget.

A Profligate Parable

2006-12-11T21:04:00.000-08:00

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

None dare approach with tidings of bad news
But only sycophants who mew and purr
Unwelcome any hint of other views

The wise have spoken and the wise concur:
The pride has come before; now come the sprawls
In him no thought or question may occur

In trouble now, he waffles and he stalls
This bubble boy who leaped into the fray
Inside the trap, he finds a creep that crawls:

His time a petty pace from day to day
His once-accomplished mission quite a feat
He sees no option other than delay

He can't advance and yet he won't retreat
So on his grill he roasts his own dead meat

He did the thing he came for: rob the purse
Of future generations yet unborn
No surplus funds, just deficits and worse

He's left to those who'll someday feel forlorn
When paying for this braggart and his bloat
Like sheep whose wool from them is deftly shorn

Before they've even grown it to a coat
The cows he milked before they ate their hay
Less like a rancher than a farmer's goat

He ate whatever plenty came his way
Then ordered up some more so he could gloat
About the fact that he would never pay

He sank for our posterity the boat
His predecessor left for him afloat

No steward, he saw nothing fit to save
"Fiduciary what?" he scoffed and spat
Conservative means more green grass to pave

To feed the wealthy lean to make them fat
The rich will work for more, the poor for less
Incentives, don't you know, are where it's at

Forget about the awful fiscal mess
Someone will come along to clean it up
No need to say you're sorry or confess

Just leave them drinking from an empty cup
Or eating plain potatoes boiled or fried
He does the hard work, screwing pooch and pup

"What's mine is mine," he sniffed, self-satisfied
"What's yours, negotiation will decide"

Procrustes had a scion unredeemed
Who thought: "One-size-fits-all should cover it"
He stretched or hacked ideas while they screamed

Until at last into his head they fit
Reactionary recrudescent riffs:
Compressed into a solitary bit

A unitary CPU for stiffs
Computing one analogy to flog
Like Mister Toad careening over cliffs

Who plunged the car into a stinking bog
Where crocodiles and snakes looked on amazed
And then fell to devouring the frog

Which proved that small amphibians once dazed
Leave reptiles unafraid; indeed unfazed

So now once more Macbeth has murdered sleep
And dreaded nightmares keep those souls awake
Who find themselves too scared to make a peep

Lest any noise alert the ones who take
Whatever in the dark they wish to claim
A life, some fun, or just a garden rake

Those things that go "bump" in the night can maim
So Baghdad cringes as an evening falls
While talking to himself, he dreams of fame

Which begs the question if he talks to walls;
But rather: Do they answer, all agog?
At such a sight so awful it appalls

Too good to pet or beat the drowning dog
He stays the course he curses, in a fog

A profligate, this son sowed waste like seed
He took his harvest first; left planting last
Someone had always come to fund each need

So he consumed his capital too fast
Where others would invest for a return
He took returns up front as would his caste

A pampered parasite who likes to burn
A hundred-dollar bill to light a toke
Some elderly portfolios to churn

To milk commissions from the needless smoke
Above two lands he left a smoggy pall
Of debt and dying as his motto croak

Upon his office door he left this scrawl:
"I added nothing; I just spent it all."

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Lunatic Leviathan

2006-12-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

The Lunatic Leviathan has burst
The bonds that once constrained its mighty lust
Let loose upon the world to do its worst
It tramples under foot whole lands to dust

Beneath its awesome wheels this Juggernaut
Would crush devotees leaping to their doom
In ecstasy that, should they die for naught,
The monster's myth would shroud them in its gloom

Mad martyrs many glimpsed the bloody plan
They'd heard of virgin harems in reserve
Awaiting only suicidal man
His adolescent fantasies to serve

But as with any contract at its edge
Good Mephistopheles has finely drawn
A tiny line of words that marks the hedge
Redeeming back the promise left in pawn

For virgins by design are not the kinds
Who do those carnal things young men require
So for eternity the martyr finds
Around him only unfulfilled desire

And as Macbeth learned, torturing his mind,
The instruments of darkness do refine
Truths only of inconsequential kind
To bait the hook upon which fools will dine

Fools take the hook, though, aiming for the bait
For making om'lets means to break some eggs
Then for the promised om'let they must wait
Till someone finds a cook who'll fry the dregs

This catastrophic graduated plan
Means jumping in the sea without a doubt
Then, later, taking time to try and scan
Horizons for the leisurely way out

For having jumped so quickly in the drink
It would not do to seem about to drown
Because we cannot either swim or think
And have no wish to take the long way down

Like Gulliver staked on the shoreline sands
Of Lilliput by many tiny ropes
Wove diligent by many tiny hands
The giant lay subdued by tiny hopes

But when some tiny Lilliputian list
Of schemes to use the giant set him free
He saw a palace fire and on it pissed
Which left enraged a tiny majesty

Although he sipped it from a bitter cup
Fame's taste would Yamamoto's plan involve
For he had dared to wake a giant up
And fill it with a terrible resolve

Some years ensued when much of proud Mankind
Decided to destroy what it had built
And after which Leviathan would find
Itself almost alone armed to the hilt

Then sated with its fill Colossus slept
A glut of slaughter piled upon its plate
While orphans bawled and widowed women wept
And ruined cities smoldered in their fate

But soon again the beast began to stir
As hunger gnawed, Leviathan smelled meat
And craved saluting soldiers shouting "Sir!"
And wished to feed on fear and horror's heat

In boredom at domestic peace profound
The Lunatic Leviathan slipped free
And went careening over sea and ground
Enraptured by its own insanity

Somehow it had inhaled a viral strain
Of vicious virtue needing a Crusade
To spread abroad the anger, strife, and pain
That its own misery for it had made

Like elephants stampeding down a street
Lined on both sides with tiny China shops
The damage done cannot be called discreet
Since raging protest rings and seldom stops

But Lunatic Leviathan had thought
That if it charged around and broke some more
That somehow that would mean that it had bought
All the unbroken China in the store

Yet when proprietors demanded cash
To pay for all the broken merchandise
The Lunatic replied that he would crash
Into some more if they did not get wise

This threat implied the old "protection rent"
Where thugs would offer safety from "that guy"
And when the victim asked what "guy" he meant
They'd say: "The ones you're looking in the eye"

Extrapolated to a larger scene
Protection rackets need an Army vast
With soldier-cops equipped and really mean
And tribute funding so the scam can last

But as the Lunatic has done the math
It pays for all itself by buying thrills
This means its children have to take a bath
Financially, by paying future bills

So as we wish to be your noble friend
You'll do the things we ask if you know best
And pardon us if we proceed to bend
Your legs and arms and necks at our behest

For as we only wish the best for you
You'll never question why we just don't leave
We've weakened you so badly now, it's true,
That if we left no doubt you wouldn't grieve

The Lunatic Leviathan felt pain
At not achieving all that it desired
For in its tiny schizophrenic brain
A bureaucratic bungle had been sired

Despite enormous strength the giant fell
For it could not coordinate its feet
So that the left one and the right as well
Could every now and then the pavement meet

Its size and bulk alone required a head
Containing thoughtful matter that could guide
And not reactionary mystic dread
Or panicked fear of those who lived outside

But Lunatic had not this fund of lore
Nor did it wonder what its eyes should see
But only did as it had done before
Whatever that had started out to be

Inertial Guidance proved the proper term
As unreflective ego spun its top
With pride and passion ever set to squirm
And wrestle never knowing how to stop

The mighty aircraft ship that carries planes
Once underway can scarcely ever turn
So thus it sticks to its appointed lanes
With no new courses left to choose or spurn

The Baby Boomer cohort got its name
From having been conceived in time of peace:
A brief respite from war that put the flame
To every land from China through to Greece

Returning soldiers from their far-flung fights
And sailors, also, from their ships at sea
And airmen, too, descended from their flights
Soon procreated their posterity

And as the Babies played, their parents slaved
They toiled and built and spoiled their growing brood
They sacrificed themselves and all they'd saved
For offspring who received this as their food

But when the Booming Babies came of age
Colossus had again begun to glare
And hunt about for some new needless rage
In which it could the reckless young ensnare

It found some in a jungle far away
Where abstract angst and fear itself conspired
To scare Leviathan into its sway
And trap it there to leave it deeply mired

This, wealthy Baby parents could descry
And so as to protect their own preserve
They coined Selective Service alibi
To choose the ones who would not have to serve

The poor and black and brown who could not hide
Were vacuumed up by Draft's relentless maw
To satisfy Leviathan's vain pride
Selective Service caught them in its draw

Thus did the Boomer generation split
Into the demographics that defined
Its better and its worse components fit
For service or avoidance most refined

But this time as the quagmire petered out
In `one's and `two's survivors filtered home
In secrecy and shame lest any shout
The "loser" name at them while mouthing foam

And so as not to learn the lesson bought
By those who bore the scars of service raw
A "syndrome" was invoked to mask the rot
That covered up a rancid, reeking flaw

For lessons unlearned have a gruesome way
Of teaching blood and sweat and tearful toil
They come around again to have their day
Exacting death's tuition as their spoil

And now those Booming Babies who once ran
Have wormed their way atop the greasy pole
And done once more the only thing they can:
Like shove some luckless soldier in a hole

Caught up now in Leviathan's demise
They seek in desperation to defray
Their debt to soldiers of a greater size
Who asked not to be used in this foul way

But symbol soldiers serve to shield the few
Who screw them if a single chance they get
Behind this conjured image brave and true
Hide some, "supporting troops" who've not died yet

But Lunatic Leviathan needs air
For it has gotten strangely out of breath
In snuffing out young life both strong and fair
It now begins to fear for its own death

Bewildered Boomer Babies now must face
The consequences of their childhood long
Few slaving parents now live to efface
The consequences of their siren song

The party life has now begun to drag
Prolonging adolescence hasn't served
The solipsistic urge to boast and brag
Our nation from its proper course has swerved

The "tough guy" Boomer Babies now lament
Those Rambo TV movies they imbibed
Their foolish gamble now cast in cement
Has left them looking weak and circumscribed

With guns or butter choices drawing near
They chose them both for they could not decide
Against the free-lunch concept they held dear
No matter how much scarcity applied

Like those who on their glowing screens portrayed
Stern visages of competence and strength
Cheerleaders for the bait-and-switch brigade
Appeared to offer latitude and length

Such emptiness as this no world had known
Where lollipops and legions mingled free
With schizoid paranoia fully blown
And greedy thieves inside the treasury

And hapless, harping, harlots followed camp
To service all that empire seemed to need
In time with contract carpetbaggers' tramp
The "gold rush" on itself began to feed

But somehow ingrate Caliban perverse
Prospero's lofty language learned too well
He profited by learning how to curse
And told his would-be master: "Go to hell!"

As Brutus spoke of time and tide that swerves
In the affairs of men which ebb and flood
The wise one takes the current when it serves
Away from shallow miseries and mud

Omitted, though, the voyage of their life
And all their ventures ill-conceived or worse
Are lost in vanity and useless strife
While they their repetitious lines rehearse

Now as Macbeth sits sulking in his pain
By men not born of women white impaled
The Birnam woods have come to Dunsinane
And all his prophecies have simply failed

Still soldiers in the desert sands adrift
Deserve a human homeward helping hand
Marooned in mayhem, needing now a lift
Out of a thankless, lethal foreign land

But while we dither dainty, doubtful, daft
With no concern much less an urgency
Our soldiers in the desert get the shaft
And lose their lives and limbs with certainty

Now struggle for the narrative begins
How soon can they the future lesson frame?
Lest held to answer for their many sins
The perpetrators can't escape the blame

This will require amnesia once again
A "syndrome" to blot out recall of loss
So in the future they can make some rain
To lubricate the luster of their boss

Who'll hire them as consultants back once more
To feed upon the public's helpless itch
“Strategic introductions" they adore
As means to peddle influence till rich

The Congressmen convened to boast their views
No "timetable" for leaving, they avowed
Which told the people what was hardly news:
No measurement of progress was allowed

For if the government could clearly plan
To do a thing and then complete the work
What hope would this not conjure up in Man,
Who'd only ever seen the beast berserk?

So bloodied soldiers still will bear the load
While Congress bloviates and stalls for time
And kicks the can on down the endless road
Till Congress can consume our last damn dime

Like rats that scurry from a sinking ship
The righteous chickens now would fly the coop
In their own droppings now they slide and slip
Their hawkish glare now fixed on their own poop

The wars of Peter Parkinson now rage
Incompetents fail upward to the top
And war expands to fill an endless age
Since no goal sets the limit when to stop

The Lunatic Leviathan now squats
And defecates on what was once a name
Which now defines no more than blood that clots
Upon a wound that serves but to defame

As ever, though, the symbol soldier tries
To do his job and through the madness strive
Forever to recall his friend that dies
Thus keeping him in memory alive

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Bring Home the Buy Time Brigade

2006-12-10T15:13:00.000-08:00

The Buy Time Brigade is busted
It's run out of money and luck
The guy at the top can't be trusted
Because he does not give a fuck

He starts with his missions accomplished
After which he unravels the gain
Then with no rock unthrown or dirt un-dished
He covers up losses and pain

Commanding, Commandments, commanded:
He's fallen in love with command
Stone deaf to how he's been backhanded
By voters and their reprimand

The people don't like what he's doing
They've told him both time and again
They're tired of his endless pooch-screwing
They want the war over by ten

That's minutes, or hours, or bedtime
That doesn't mean weeks, months, or years
For those who don't listen, it's dead time
Like getting tossed out on their ears

The blood and the billions have vanished
It's time for the twerp to atone
To Dante's tenth level he's banished
A new low for just him alone

Or maybe Dick Cheney will join him
To smirk at his armpit and sneer
Which Dubya will take as a coin hymn
A chant to make money and cheer

The Fig Leaf Contingent from Asia
Has come back again to be heard:
"Fuck him and his fucked-up Fantasia!
No Lyndon Baines Bush: Texas turd!"

And no more from old Tricky Dickies
Those Kissingers, Nixons, and Fords
The vampires who left us with hickeys
From bleeding our necks for their gourds

Just cut off the money and maybes
Just quit all the stalling for time
We don't need these rats with their rabies
To rob us of our last thin dime

The Buy Time Brigade has no reason
Except to die fighting for zilch
To parasites we're open season:
Our pockets and veins they will filch

Their greed knows no limits too hyper
Yet before all our regiments fade
It's past time to pay off the piper
And bring home the Buy Time Brigade

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Soldier's Soldier

2006-12-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

Scapegoat of the king's ambition
Hostage to the prince's crime
Sent upon a madman's errand
Soldier of another time

Sworn to do as he is bidden
Not to think of why he came
From himself his purpose hidden
Soldier by another name

Searching for a mystic evil
Ever just a war away
Always beaten, not defeated
Back to fight another day

Battles always won, but cheated
Of the promised victory
Never lost but just depleted
Army of our history

Kill the chicken; scare the monkey
Centipede is dead, not stiff
Off to far Cathay he marches
Soldier diving off a cliff

War not done but just abated
Peace the only thing to fear
Power's hunger never sated
Soldier's orders never clear

Dragon's teeth by Cadmus planted
Sprung from battle's plain full grown
Men who kill them all if doubtful
Heathen gods will know their own

Burn the village, clear the jungle
Save them from themselves at least
Make excuses for the bungle
Soldier then becomes the beast

Wounds still fresh and redly bleeding
Bound up with a filthy rag
Something shapeless once a husband
Stuffed into a plastic bag

Squatting in the dusty swelter
Widowed woman once a wife
Never more to know the shelter
Of a tranquil married life

Head thrown back in boundless grieving
Mouth agape with soundless woes
Tears and snot now glisten, mingling
Coursing down from eyes and nose

Anguished face a tangled curtain
Clotted, matted, raven hair
Almond eyes with sight uncertain
Weeping pools of deep despair

Do not knock this war we're having
It's the only one we've got
"Better Dead Than Red," we tell them
Mouthing slogans; talking rot

Fight them over there they tell us
Rather that than fight them here
Just invent some casus bellus
Danger's best that's never near

Ozymandias' sneering statue
Crumbled in the desert bare:
Look upon my works, you mighty
See their ruin and take care

Told to teach and be creative
Soldier eager, bright and young
Learned instead and then went native
Speaking now an ancient tongue

Only they will now receive him
Who see not his bloodstained hand
None will hear for he can't speak it
Stranger to his own lost land

Bringing with him what he carried
Losing only what he bought
To the cause no longer married
Soldier doing what he ought

Shipped away like so much baggage
Not to choose the things he's done
Often bad and sometimes better
Soldier not the only one

Now he comes home like the others
Breathless lips and eyes shut fast
Lain to sleep beside his brothers
Soldier's soldier to the last

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Syndromes of Wisdom

2006-12-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

"You must not invade Mother Russia," it's said
In the vast, bitter wintertime cold
Napoleon, though, thought he'd figured a way
So did Hitler, or so we are told.

"Do not get bogged down in an Asian land war,"
So they once taught cadets at West Point
Not that France or America listened, of course
Till their noses got wrenched out of joint

"Do not spit to windward," the sailors will say
Or you'll get the snot back in your face
Not that landlubbers heed these instructions so wise
Which accounts for their loss with no trace

"Do not use a puppet to run your affairs"
If you don't know the nature of string
With two ends, you know, it can pull either way
As the bad puppet chorus will sing

As they train the young dogs not to shit where they live
And the cats not to pee on the rug
So America ought not to jump in the hole
That it has only recently dug

Latrines have their uses, but swimming ain't one
Not unless you like stinking and slimed
So America ought not to dive in the ditch
Out of which it has only just climbed

We haven't yet found our way out of this mess
Still, before any learning can start
All the ones who so brazenly lit the last fuse
Seem to fear that we might lose the art

They've gone back again to the tried and the trite
Seeking slogans to mask their retreat
In a panic that soon we won't do this again
"Isolationist!" now they repeat

In the land of the blind rules a king with one eye
Whose perspective is greatly obscured
Like the fabulous realm of the learning impaired
Where the people know only one word

The sunken investments run deep, far, and wide
And to give them up now would be bad
Never mind all those kids with the lost legs and arms
We must not make the stockholders sad

The headstones grow grim in the grass ‘round their graves
As the rows of their ranks slowly fill
While the numbers and dates tell a story of lives
Ended short, not for good but for ill

What remains of their bodies lies buried away
While their souls through eternity fall
Leaving only their memories fading in friends
And their names on a black-granite wall

They bang the drum slowly; they play the horn sad
They preach and console and reprise
Their denials that youth really dies for the old
While the story the statesmen revise

Now furious fear flings more sand in the face
As the trial balloons litter the sky
Once again it's a "syndrome" to think of the waste,
To remember, and understand why

What kind of a people would coin a cliché
Using "syndrome" to lie and appease
All to cover a wish to make wisdom passé
Just a symptom of one more disease?

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Dumb Peyote

2006-12-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

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

The leper knight erroneous has erred
Mistaking might for right he wrongly thought
That "errantry" meant any deed he dared

As long as others paid for what he wrought
No costs to him in any case accrued
Who robbed the future for the now he bought

An irresponsibility imbued
From childhood: early, middle-aged, and late
That never grew but only came unglued

When all his haughty hype dissolved in hate
Because the minds he lit on fire then burned
Consuming meals that no one ever ate

While others got the bill for what he earned:
Some lessons only stated, never learned

Connected to the teleprompter crawl
Some moving lines he labored to pronounce
But what began as boast became a bawl

For on his lies he feared the truth would pounce
If ever he acknowledged what all knew:
That any check he wrote would quickly bounce

As he had made deposits small and few
To fund his overdrawn Crusade account
Compared to princely sums that he withdrew

No actuaries told of an amount
Offsetting compound interest as it grew
A hemorrhage erupting in a fount

A punctured fiscal artery or two --
His lookouts on the stern cried: "Thar she blew!"

His rotting nose and ears and finger tips
Left him no way to smell and hear and feel
So with his face he launched a thousand slips

Forgetting only first to lay a keel
He swung a champagne bottle at some air
Thus christening his fantasies as real

While in the Hellish Land grief and despair
Resulted from the dreams of this rude runt
Who saw a darkened cloud and called it fair

Who tried to score but found he had to punt
He played at pope and captain from his pew
His life behind him, only less in front

No Starbuck, he wished only for a crew
Who did not fear the whales that wise men do

His white whale hunt produced white elephants
And albatrosses hung about his neck
Which even bought-and-paid-for sycophants

Described as nothing but a total wreck
Like Ishmael left floating on his box
Alone upon the waves a tiny speck

The witness shook his fist to curse the pox
That serving such a madman made his life
Adrift with only seabirds in their flocks

To hear his telling of the sorry strife
An audience up in the air above
Whose cries much like the whistle and the fife

Accompanied the lyrics telling of
A ship sunk by stupidity, not love

This Dumb Peyote, armadillo ass,
Set out to wrong all rights that ever were
And championed Medusa, maiden crass,

Who turned to stone whomever looked at her
While he with terror's windmills vainly strove
By catapulting propaganda slur

At any that took note of how he drove
The ship of state off course and onto rocks
As cronies drained the country's treasure trove

And cut their taxes; boosting up the stocks
Of his own self-selected VP pick:
A Search-and-Pinch-'em turning back the clocks

To tell a time of former torments sick
Before his basement shrine to Tricky Dick

Thus as the scrolling sounds too quickly sped
From right to left before his thoughtless gaze;
Through empty chambers nestled in his head;

The one who would command stared in a daze
At chicken hawks now coming home to roost
And rats deserting courses that he stays

From his collapsed Crusade he gets no boost
Yet in the bowels of a bunker crypt
A constipated comrade's colon loosed

And whispers of some slogan-schedules slipped
Leaked out to lubricate the greasy pole
With blood from all the victims they had gypped

Who in the hanging wish to play a role --
A little slop of horrors in their bowl

So Dumb Peyote, leper knight errant,
Tried playing captain Ahab, too, and more
But as he couldn't read, spoke only cant

That others wrote and which he only swore
While trying hard to play the common sort
Who didn't mean to be the crushing bore

Who every conversation will abort
Like landings turned into a fiery crash
Because he has but only one retort:

"I'll have my war; you pony up the cash!"
To which the opposition says: "Why, sure!
We'll gladly let you handle all the stash."

Thus ever leper knights spread their manure
From whose infection none have found a cure

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Asinine Ambivalence

2006-12-08T21:57:00.000-08:00

"Maybe or Maybe Not"
A poem insearch of New York Senator You-Know-Her (With apologies to Rudyard Kipling who wrote "If")

If you would lose your head when others wouldn’t
And let polls do your thinking when you won’t,
If you could trust George Bush when wise men couldn’t
But still excuse his lying when they don’t,
If you can wait for someone else to lead us,
And being led yourself, follow behind,
And, living large, dine with the ones who bleed us,
Yet never seem to pay us any mind;

If you’re content to make George Bush your master,
If you can slink away to his estate;
If you can turn Triumph into Disaster
And treat Joe Lieberman as your blind date;
If you can bear to hear the lies you've spoken
Straightened by truth to make you look the fool,
Or watch what former Democrats built broken,
While right-wing cynics use you as their tool;

If you can make one heap of all our army
And risk their lives on one throw of the dice,
And lose, and cover up by speaking smarmy
And blame somebody else by talking nice;
If you can show no heart or nerve or sinew
Yet serve your own self even as you flee,
And so put out when there is nothing in you
Except the sign you wear which says: "Kick me!"

It could be that someone will come to teach you
Some braver soul, perhaps, will show the way
Maybe an errant vertebra will reach you
Perhaps your spine will stiffen one fine day
You may, perhaps, or maybe you won’t, either
Perhaps you’ll skitter further to the right
Like other chicken hawks, you need a breather
Before the next time that you take to flight

With luck, we won’t lose more than three each day now
Perhaps only a dozen died this week
It could be you’ve found some cool way to say, “Wow!
Just look at all that ‘Victory’ we seek!”
You could have chanced to find some Chinese money
To borrow from our children for your war
Maybe you’ll visit good King George, your honey,
And pledge your party as his loyal whore

You and the press have sure played Rip Van Winkle
And gone to sleep to wake up out to lunch
While vampires on our “values” loudly sprinkle
Invective while continuing to munch
Yet still you quake and quiver at the vision
Of greedy bats out after our last dime
Upon our necks they make a new incision
While you prevaricate and stall for time

While Cindy Sheehan shows true grit you wobble
And, like the wildebeest, hide in the herd
Content to let the lion chew and gobble
On others’ children – all without a word
Perhaps you’ll dodge a vote and so we’ll stay in
Most likely you’ll decry some burning flags
While soldiers die you slither on your way in
To Senate chambers famed for bogus gags

No doubt you’ll raise more funds to sell your virtue,
And kneel for kings to lose the common touch,
While only friends but not your foes desert you;
Because you’ve asked too little for so much,
You’ll likely fill the unforgiving hour
With only sixty seconds' worth of work,
And still expect the Earth for you to flower,
Which maybe will not happen now, you jerk!

Michael Mury, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Boobie Unconscious Projection

2006-12-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

The Boobie Grand Ventriloquist
Put on a sight to see
He showed just how projection works
And did it all for free
(Except for a "donation" that
He called "gratuity")

A giant statue sat on stage
As huge as any tree
A little man then sat upon
A giant wooden knee
And threw a voice out of himself
Like it had come from "HE"

In normal tones of voice this man
Impressed no one at all
But when he shouted "GAWD IZ GRATE!"
A hush consumed the hall
And into Boobie minds there seeped
A sick miasmic pall

The statue never moved an inch
As wooden things don't do
But on its knee the little man
Had started turning blue
(It seemed that he had held his breath
And counted up to two)

"Don't let him die!" the crowd beseeched
In rapt insanity
Then color came back to his face;
He breathed more easily
(It seemed that he had exhaled once
He'd counted up to three)

"HE heard your prayers!" the man rejoiced
"As you can clearly see!
And what is more, you'd best believe
That HE looks out for me.
I'm just HIS trusted messenger
Who brings HIS plans for thee."

"I cannot move but by HIS will.
I serve at HIS command.
This BIG GUY that you see right here
Would rather not demand;
But if HE has to, then HE will;
So here's what HE's got planned ..."

The little man brought down the house
And as the curtain fell
The Boobies clapped and danced and sang
Enchanted by the spell
They'd all heard GAWD HIMSELF dispense
Commands that went down well

In Boobie red-state USA
The trick works quite the same
Where Boobie George has jury-rigged
A "GAWD" that "hears" its name
Invoked each time that Boobie George
Desires to light a flame

But out in "heartland" USA
Where trees and acres live
A different symbol scheme requires
The Boobies to forgive
The Boobie George's brain that leaks
Much like a mental sieve

You see, with all the things gone wrong
At home and overseas
The sacrilegious thought might grow
That GAWD had heard no pleas
From wounded, dying soldiers or
Those looted Iraqis

So bumbling Boobie George ginned up
A Rube Goldberg machine
That cranked out TV symbols of
A patriotic scene
Implying GAWD had exercised
HIS choice to intervene

One symbol looked just like a flag
The old Red-White-and-Blue
But blown up to gigantic size
So none would miss the cue
That GAWD and FLAG had just conspired
To make one thing from two

The GAWD-FLAG that George had designed
Contained no flaws or blights
Its crude associations let no
No mind elude its slights
As Boobies found their simple thoughts
Compressed to rude sound-bites

The image of the little man
In GAWD-FLAG's awesome lights
Consumed the Boobie targets who
Could not escape its sights
It hit them, like the sailors say,
Between the running lights

And Boobie sailors in the crowd
Went psycho -- lewd and hushed:
They spent like drunken Reagans and
At Cheney's language blushed
They didn't know to go hog-wild
Or just feel simply crushed

And Boobie soldiers looking on
In groups of two's and three's
Morphed suddenly in Photoshop
To number as the bees
That swarm about a honey comb
Adoring queens who tease

And Boobie airmen out on leave
From their academy
Felt suddenly compelled to stop
Harassing property
Preferring to assault fellow
Cadets, both he and she

And Guardsmen working at the jails
Saw all of this and more
They took it in and then commenced
To beat their charges sore
Why not, when all their leadership
Had gone to sleep to snore

Associating little man
With GAWD-FLAG has its price
Convincing fearful Boobies that
They needn't act so nice
Combining fright and power to
Turn humans into lice

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005

Mesopotamia's Revenge

2006-12-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

I think we have a "new" strain of the IraqNamese version of the Aztec Toilet Two-Step now spreading through America's "foreign policy elites." Call it Mesopotamia's Revenge":

See the lame ruptured duck, Deputy Dubya Bush, do the "Funky Chicken" endlessly moonwalking backwards over the same ground on his way to his "vision" of Mars.

Hear his influence-peddling advisor, Henry Kissinger, lament that our friends will lose their "confidence" and our enemies will lose their "fear" if Deputy Dubya, "the leader of the free world," doesn't resolutely continue behaving in this ludicrous fashion, all the while "steadfastly" shitting blood and billions like bird diarrhea from an incontinent idiot ostrich.

Observe both our "friends" and "enemies" protest vehemently that Henry Kissinger insults their good sense and intelligence by supposing them as stupid and blind as him.

Gradual Catastrophic Omelets

2006-12-07T21:00:00.000-08:00

Yes, fellow Catastrophic Gradualists, the two old hippies without spacesuits on the moon -- Messrs Baker and Hamilton -- have come up with seventy-nine proposals for things that might work should America ever adopt the one proposal that it adamantly proclaims it won't: namely, leave Iraq. In other words, the "American Political Peril Patrol" (misnamed deliberately as the so-called "Iraq Study Group") has labored mightily and come to the conclusion that somebody had better start learning to make omelets instead of just breaking eggs, so to speak. Otherwise, the fate of America's indigenous Romanovs and Rasputins might come to resemble in uncomfortable respects that of their Russian namesakes in 1917. But not to worry, these things take time and nothing happens all in an "instant" (i.e., an Orwellian euphemism meaning "four years" to George W. Bush and eight "next-six-critical-months" to Thomas Friedman.) So all hail the onset of the glacier race whose finish line our descendants may one day descry at the beginning of the next geological epoch. A marathon, not a race; then a journey, not a marathon; then, a suggestion, not a schedule; then, a goal, not a commitment; then the Ice Age commeth. "America will stay in Iraq for a long" ... long ... long ... long "time."

Meanwhile, the canary Democrats in Congress have already sniffed the poison gas of a monumental 160-billion-dollar Pentagon porkbarrel raid on the treasury -- the most blatantly naked to date -- and dutifully expired before even entering the darkened mine shaft. Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Senator Bernie Sanders (who between them pass for the only "Left" in American political life today) have clearly said that we cannot possibly allow Sheriff Dick and Deputy Dubya any further free-lunch, rob-the-future, creative "financing" for their Warfare Welfare and Make-Work Militarism other than for troop withdrawal from Iraq first -- using the seventy billion dollars already appropriated by the previous Congress. Anything else remains open for the porkers at the trough to negotiate "later."

Hint! Hint! Democrats: take "now" (i.e., Peace) now and let the Republicans have "later" (i.e., War) later. They certainly didn't have any problem doing for themselves first and doing to you later when they held the purse strings for the past twelve years. Just keep saying to yourself what Dick Cheney said after the Republicans won the previous mid-term elections: namely, "We won the mid-terms. This is our due." And if any Republicans come around whining about their isolation and irrelevance, just say to them (with a smile) what Dick Cheney said to a Democratic Senator not long ago: namely, "Go fuck yourself." [End stud buzzard quail-hunter quotes.]

I agree with those who claim that the so-called "Iraq Study Group" had little to do with Iraq and everything to do with covering up for bungling American policy makers who have once again tried to make a sandwich out of soup. But in that case, this collection of over-the-hill political hacks should have honestly called themselves the "America Study Group." Not having the honesty to openly address themselves to themselves-as-the-problem, they have tried to drag the hapless Iraqis into their own muddied puddle as a rubber-ducky life preserver. Haven't the Iraqi people suffered enough from these arrogant and self-centered people? America needs to take care of its own domestic political "American" problems: what H. L. Menken called "the strife of the parties at Washington" and what Barbara Tuchman called "intimidation by the rabid right at home." Solution of this problem will save the rest of the world -- and especially the Iraqis -- the awful trauma of having to endure America's good-intentioned "help" paving for them another eight-lane superhighway straight into the hellish tunnel at the end of the light.

As a former South Asian ambassador to America and France once explained to me why his government turned down American offers of military aid: "If the Americans come, they will just draw an arbitrary line through a temporary problem and make it permanent." The Koreans would understand perfectly. No doubt the Iraqis now understand, too.

No promised omelets, fellow Catastrophic Gradualists; just more and more broken eggs -- and those mysterious, unauthorized electronic withdrawals from the kids' trust fund for mystical "meals" that no one has ever identified, let alone consumed.

Two Old Hippies on the Moon

2006-12-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

I just saw Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton on CNN International here in Taiwan. Baker said with no hesitation and with a perfectly straight face: "The U.S. will stay in Iraq for a long time." He and the other old guy sitting next to him said a lot of other stuff, too, all of which the above quotation renders moot. No mention by either elderly gentleman, of course, of where a broke and increasingly indebted America will get the blood and funds to do all this "staying," let alone why any "sovereign" Iraqi government worth the name would allow the American military to remain on its territory or in its airspace for even a moment.

While watching this surreal, Orwellian scene, I had a flashback to some four decades ago when I witnessed a breathless, sweet young thing from Los Angeles announce her intention to go north to San Francisco where she intended to "live with" the hippy community there in the Haight Ashbury district. A TV interviewer asked her how she planned to support herself. "How will you eat?" he inquired. Her innocent, glassy-eyed reply:

"Why, food ... just ... 'is'!"

I never saw such improbable old hippies in my life as these two semi-embalmed establishment elders speaking of impending national bankruptcy without a care in the world. Somewhere in the back of my mind I could just hear them saying:

"Why, but ... blood ... and billions ... just … 'are'!"

Meanwhile, back in the "real" world:

They lost three thousand souls last month
While we lost seventy;
Yet we say the Iraqis have
No sense of "urgency."

We take our time; we drag our feet;
We dawdle and we stall;
Then we blame the Iraqis for
The snail's pace that we crawl.

Yes, I think I see poetic possibilities here, if not the doom awaiting unsuited astronauts exiting their spacecraft on the airless surface of the moon, foolishly taking the presence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure for granted.

O. J. Cheney and Bush Did It

2006-12-06T15:14:00.000-08:00

Already, America's excusers-of-the-inexcusable have begun to tell us that if the little Clinton condom doesn't fit Big Dick Cheney and his Dwarvish Dork Dubya, then we surely must acquit O. J. Cheney and Bush because trying them for historic crimes against America and the world would just take up so much "valuable time" that the Congress needs to expend on "important" stuff like flag-burning amendments, queer weddings, denying safe abortions to frightened pregnant girls, and idly speculating about which binary, take-it-or-take-it Hobson's "choice" the American people will have presented to them two years from now in November of 2008.

We find ourselves mired in IraqNam with the "Worst and the Dullest" PRECISELY because we didn't hang the "Best and the Brightest" who did this very same inexcusably stupid thing forty years ago. And if we don't tar-and-feather this benighted bunch now, when we have real reasons better than anyone ever had before, then we will only get "even worse" (like the Iraqis always get) later on. Take it from the "conservatives." They will tell you every time that punishment "deters" future crime -- usually by the same criminals.

If the Congess will just start working FIVE DAYS A WEEK (or SIX, like so many other struggling Americans) they will have all the time they need to wrap up an open-and-shut case against two outlaws so arrogant that they've already publicly -- not to say proudly -- confessed to their crimes and promised even more to come. Even O. J. Simpson waited until years after his acquittal to actually -- sort of -- admit what he "might have" done "if" he had actually done it. Cheney and Bush did it. No question. Case open. Case closed.

Our lazy and corrupt Congress has nothing of any value to do anyway except three simple things: (1) cut off funding for the occupation of Iraq; (2) revoke the stupid "authorization" for the occupation of Iraq; and (3) punish the perpetrators of the occupation of Iraq. Congress has nothing BETTER to do with its (meaning, "our") time than the "Watergate" Congress or the "Iran-Contra" Congress did. As a matter of fact, we only HAVE a Congress -- for precisely "checks and balances" reasons -- so that they (in accordance with the plans of our founders) will jealously pursue implacable vendettas against the other branches of government which ever seek to steal their power from them -- by design and with all the native human viciousness that history has ever recorded.

Some people have never learned this lesson in elementary civics, but as James Madison put it: After giving devilish men the power to govern other men, the great trick lies in constructing a government so divided against itself that the normal human devils will counteract and neutralize each other, rendering government too paralyzed to plunder the people of their liberties. In other words, none of our founders ever envisioned a government of angels, as Madison said, because angels wouldn't need a government. Men and women, though, need a little of it, but not too much. Therefore, send not to know whom the "centrist" Democrats work "with," but rather whose asses they soundly kick and whom they resolutely and tirelessly fight "against." Anything left standing after the fraternal fight will, by default and exhaustion "get done."

Someday, if all goes well for justice, America, and the world, O. J. Cheney and Bush may hire a ghostwriter to help them publish an unauthorized autobiographical apology pleading for mercy and understanding, entitled: "If only we hadn't done it." Too bad for everyone concerned, but they did.

Albino Pachyderms

2006-12-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

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

White elephants sit in the living room
Like Johnson's Cyclops mother of a wife
Inhibiting the conversation's bloom

Suggesting by their presence sordid strife
Returns upon investments others made
Supported troops supported out of life

Supporting politicians in the shade
Who can't support enough to get their fill
Upon the treasury they make a raid

To profit from supporting those who kill
With such support the troops deploy once more
Their stop-loss orders telling them they will

A back-door draft supporting troops galore:
Their Raven contracts honored "Nevermore."

Supporters of the troops roll in the dough
Their carpetbagging no-bid contracts huge
It's not the what but rather whom they know

Their lobby toilet-swirl a centrifuge
That separates no quo from any quid
They figure after them comes the deluge

So better get it now and get it hid
A last-chance grab at all the graft that spurts
From under troop-supporting's toilet lid

They chant their Mammon mantra till it hurts
To grease the skids for their corrupt cohort
Out from their flapping lips their lying blurts:

"Support, support, support, support, support!
For sport for sport for sport for sport for sport!"

A "higher" father George the Worst consults
Like Jesus putting Joseph in his place
A put-down of his dad that got results

Like Mama causin' Joe to lose his face
By fornicatin' with a larger dude
Who knocked her up and left Joe in disgrace

The butt of village jokes both lame and rude
A scarlet Hebrew letter marks his shame
A cuckold branded for ineptitude

Whose ingrate stepson chooses to defame
The carpenter whose work earned him release
From doin' bidness in the earthly game

Like Zeus seducing peasant girls in Greece
Old Yahweh came on down and got a piece

Thus satisfied in his own mind he plays
With legendary myths about his birth
His limited attention span betrays

No grasp of any knowledge of the earth
But with the Big Spook coaching him at night
He feels no consciousness of any dearth

So anything, he figures, adds up right
As long as "up in heaven" Daddy grins
And says to disregard the nation's plight

For nothing that George does can count as sins
To those who never think a dumb thing odd
For all the lies and bullshit that he spins

They genuflect and kowtow to a fraud
Who swears that late at night he talks to GAWD

White elephants mean waste on scales so vast
That few can comprehend the sunken cost
Or summon any samples from the past

To illustrate just how much we have lost
But like the busted gambler who can't quit
She hopes tomorrow's sun will melt the frost

And so into the wringer goes her tit
While Betty Boops and pampered poops cavort
Like flies about an open wound they flit

In pain, the faces of our troops contort
While she supports King George and all his germs
Such rank ingratitude at their "support"!

They only hope to finish out their terms
These asinine albino pachyderms

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

A Clockwork Phoenix Epiphany

2006-12-05T22:57:00.000-08:00

(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

A New Leash on Lives

2006-12-05T21:17:00.000-08:00

I support Congressman Dennis Kucinich -- as would have Alexander Hamilton -- in his proposal to curb Executive wars of presidential aggrandizement by simply denying our pathetic, erstwhile Napoleons the funds for their military misadventures.

I understand that the Constitution specifically states that all money bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which the Democratic Party -- suitably empowered by the American people -- now controls. So I fail to see why the Democrats don't simply disregard what the discredited Sheriff Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush say they want. These reckless, free lunch, deadbeat gamblers have had all the Warfare Welfare and Make-work Militarism that any corrupt and clueless co-presidency should ever have gotten its four dirty hands on in the first place. The Congress can and should hold its own hearings and then budget its own spending proposals for withdrawing our military forces from Iraq before considering any other military spending requests. With the troops' safe withdrawal from Iraq funded, the porkers can then fight over their own needlessly bloated weapons systems, obsolete bases, et cetera. Anyone wishing for any more of these needless things than what the nation's income can afford, pay-as-you-go, can come up with the necessary new revenues to fund them. That ought to put an end to all this Iraq occupation bullshit really fast.

This victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) does not intend to stand by silently and witness the needless slaughter of the Cheney-Bush Buy Time Brigade. As the jaded Vietnamese bar girls used to taunt the broke and hard-up GIs on Tu Do Street in Saigon: "No money, no honey!"

Now, go to it Congressional Democrats. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has shown you the way. Sheriff Dick and Deputy Dubya need a new leash on lives -- a short one.

Managing the Mindless Mutt

2006-12-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

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

The Persian Mullah meditating means
To rule in fact without the needless name
Sets up his throne behind the curtain screens

In grim Iraq on fire with Allah’s flame
With problems plenty on his pious plate
Like how this giant Yankee dog to tame

So that it bites the former Baathist state
But not the statesmen of the Shiite sect
Who have their own assassination slate

In case beguiled believers don’t elect
Militia ethnic cleansers all agog
Submissive to august Imams select

Whose fatwa edicts set the mobs to flog
Themselves -- and girls in gym gear out to jog

Yet still the Yankee army cur commands
Due caution from Imams who use such mutts
And value keeping fingers, toes, and hands

Avoiding getting bitten on their butts
For even though the President now pimps
Our troops to serve as mercenary sluts

The barking bombers hover in their blimps
With plans to blast Mahomet’s “safe-house” bed
The mangy ‘Murcan mongrel snarls and limps

The trapped, frustrated infidel sees red
In Persian gears a captive canine cog
Kept outside so it can’t defile the shed

Its deadly beat a daily grinding slog
For Persian priests too good to pet the dog

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Moving-target Mismanagement

2006-12-05T16:25:00.002-08:00

In Baghdad, our ambassador
So-called: the Afghan Hound
Had vetoed the Iraqi choice,
To throw his weight around

So now for their Prime Minister
Iraq has got our guy
Whose lack of credibility
Makes Colin Powell sigh

George summoned on short notice
This "leader" he had picked
Then as the world watched, mortified,
George Bush's boots he licked

George looked him in the eyeball
To see the inner man
Then saw what he had come to see:
The planning of a plan!

They plan to play mechanic
They've planned the script and scene
They plan to work the levers of
Their Rube Goldberg machine

They plan on repetition
The public mind to sway
They plan to say they have a plan
Three hundred times a day

George slept on 9/11
Then saw his great big chance:
He'd cover up for failure by
Concocting a romance!

He had no plan for "victory"
He barely had a prayer
Still, if he could not fight them "here"
He'd fight them "over there"

So now Iraq means "over there"
A place where George can fight
The "terrorism" he creates
'Cause he can't get things right

Deep in the Green Zone Castle
Surrounded by high walls
George makes his visit unannounced
Which shows he has no balls

Why not do that "flypaper" thing,
Just like those troops of his?
Why not attract some "flies" to show
The genius that he is?

Repuglicans ran Congress, too
This meant they got to say
How they "supported troops" but gave
Themselves a raise in pay

They made a valiant effort
They sought to pass the buck
So at a doughnut rolling 'round
They took a flying fuck

Frustrated "over there," George planned
To move around and roam
Conducting all-out war against
His critics back at home

He planned to show activity
He planned to have a plan
Then focused on some floating straws
Like any drowning man

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Boobie Recipe for Risk Aversion

2006-12-05T16:25:00.001-08:00

The mawkish milquetoast mavens moan
Their middle-ism bland
While hapless hiding hormones drip
From their small gutless gland
Inducing risk aversion in
The voters of the land

"Triangulate and trim your sails"
(The Boobie Clinton plan)
Results in Gore and Kerry and
The ones who with them ran
Like "Don't give up your day job" Joe,
The weepin' Lieberman

The “values” voters sling their mud
And howl and spit and swear
Inventing lies and slander that
The Boobies grin and bear
Especially the Democrats
Who think that Boobies care

Consultants for the Democrats
Have found a way to sell
Themselves and all their worthless crap
To those who like the smell
Of loss at which they salivate
Like dogs to Pavlov’s bell

To hide their hiding on the Right
Some “Democrats” have coined
A new word, “centrist,” which they hope
Will leave the fight unjoined
And them to share a scrap of what
The Right has not purloined

Since “values” voters seem to like
The raw and mean and rough
What makes the Democrats afraid
To kick ass and get tough?
Do they suppose that Boobies find
The low road low enough?

What evidence has yet been found
To prove that Boobies mind
A voyage through the sewer if
A vote or two they find
For those who kick the ones who will
Not give it back in kind?

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Praise and Damnation

2006-12-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

If we wish to perpetuate a problem rather than solve it, we can formulate no better fudge than to pronounce the problem "a priori" (before the fact) or "prima facie" (on the face of it) unsolvable. Yes, fellow dropouts from Uncle Jim-Bob's Charter Hillbilly Homeschool! Just by lookin' at stuff and before even thinkin' 'bout anythin' we can conclude that we haven't a prayer of coming up with a "good" (or whatever other self-defeating modifier you prefer) solution. This dialectical dodge usually takes the form of saying, colloquially: "We have no 'good' options" or "damned if we do, and damned if we don't," et cetera. Yet, as Charles Sanders Peirce said of all such a-philosophical attempts at "blocking the road of inquiry": merely "pronouncing a thing inexplicable does not explain it." In precisely the same way, pronouncing a problem insoluble does not solve it. But then, some people prefer the problem. That odious observation should seem obvious even to the obtuse.

In fact, we [meaning America as a nation] have some "very good," if not "excellent" options for getting out of Iraq and saving two nations in the process. For example, ceasing to spend EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS just this MONTH on uselessly bouncing some rubble up and down -- while getting THREE THOUSAND Iraqis and SEVENTY GIs killed amid all the pointlessly bouncing rubble -- sounds like an excellent savings (or "winnings") to me. (See Ben Franklin for an equivalent aphorism involving pennies saved and earned). I'd sure prefer "winning" those lives and dollars by leaving than "losing" those lives and dollars by staying. Multiply the preceding example by TWELVE (plus an escalation-due-to-disintegration factor) if you wish to know what America and Iraq will "win" by America staying in Iraq just one more year, let alone the "long time" (presumably much longer than just one more year) projected the other day by Donald Rumsfeld's new lightweight clone: a Mr. Gates or something like that (not that the identity of such a clueless cipher means anything noteworthy). Things have only gotten worse the longer we've stayed in Iraq and things will only keep getting worse the longer we stay in Iraq; but this will not stop paradox-producing pundits from claiming that things will get "even worse" if we leave. As Bart Simpson would exclaim in utter disbelief at such self-serving, self-fulfilling prophecies: "Ay, Carumba!"

Come to think of it, paradox-producing American pundits have little to offer by way of even "new" bullshit about "winning" and "losing" quagmires like Iraq since, for the most part, they've never even become aware of the "old" bullshit-debunking slogan we finally learned in getting out of Vietnam forty years ago: namely, "We lost the day we started and we won the day we stopped." We will forthwith exit from Iraq once we learn to formulate our choices in achievable terms rather than in self-hobbling conundrums. Once we "win" what we can and stop "losing" what we need not, future generations will say of us what the world said of our previously long-postponed enlightenment in Southeast Asia: "Praised when they left and damned when they didn't." It all depends on what we mean when, and if, we really desire to mean anything at all.

A Useless Ewe

2006-12-04T22:50:00.002-08:00

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

How did the Nazi Germans get like that?
Why did the Japanese do such fell deeds?
How did America grow dumb and fat?

Why does our media spout fascist screeds?
Like ruptured ducks they waddle, limp and quack
Our chicken hawk a timid twitter bleeds

A pigeon on her stool she sings for slack
So she can coo and squawk and glare and cluck
Her stupid vote for war she won’t take back

Instead, she stalls and hides and hopes for luck
Invested in the bars of her own cage
Her signature refrain: buk! buk! buk! buk!

She pecks and scratches, fitful, on the stage
Her part already fading from the page

She piles up heaps of corporation cash
To foster the impression of a lead
Reactionaries throw for her a bash

To help her buy a job without the need
To find out whom the people would prefer
She’d like to have the title and the deed

But not what she would just as soon defer:
A stance on issues ravaging the land
From which ambivalence we can infer

That we need someone not so blind and bland
No leadership from her will manifest
Until we’ve put aside the other hand

Which makes decision easy to ingest
And moot the question of her quisling quest

For who requires an also-ran to run?
Who follows those advancing to the rear?
Who offer no new thing beneath the sun

No lure to them who’ve cast aside her fear
And have no wish to truck with it again
Why wait for years if only then to hear

The call to act like mice and not like men
Advice to trim the sails and not make waves
To baldly go where everyone has been

A road to hell this good intention paves
Before and after; both sides of the street
A path that neither life or treasure saves

Much better left to warm her Senate seat
This useless ewe continuing to bleat

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

Innocent Bystanders

2006-12-04T22:50:00.001-08:00

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

“Collateral” once meant a surety
A word that guaranteed a loan repaid
But now it means an insecurity

A type of damage in a bombing raid
Some innocents who die for being there
Bystanders killed by bombers unafraid

Who drop their loads from three miles in the air
Or fling them from their ships and submarines
Destroying things in no need of repair

And lives unlived for having Arab genes
Some rag-head camel jockeys all alike
Who ought to be in jail if in their teens

“Of military age” means prone to strike
Increased resistance we just call a “spike”

So after years of “spiking” every day
And corners turned by tipping points and such
The garbage keeps exploding in a spray

Of shrapnel robbing fingers of their touch
As hands and wrists and elbows disappear
A mission that accomplished nothing much

Accomplishes still less with each new year
While costs of non-accomplishing increase
Diminishing returns have made it clear

That soon all this accomplishing will cease
Or else the Great Success will score such gains
As then to drown in its own grisly grease

A summing up of war’s enormous pains
That shows how much it pours when once it rains

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

The Great Success Gets Even Longer

2006-12-04T22:50:00.000-08:00

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

The Great Success again has now returned
Although some reinforcements wouldn’t hurt
The lives of thousands it has wrecked and burned

Yet still its praises he will blindly blurt
The facts of failure we refuse to face
To mask them he will hide the bloody shirt

Our shameless leaders bask in their disgrace
With sophistry and slogans on their smiles
Our doubts about their wisdom they displace

With woeful waffling wrought with wicked wiles
They bathe in money from their crony friends
And then misplace the records and their files

"Forgetting" where it starts and where it ends
Amnesia saves corruption from amends

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006