JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Stage right sit the land owners

grim faced with flag and bible

around them shadows of stockades and laagers

where even women and children carry guns

 

On the left sit green folk anxious for your blessing

bowls filled with a mess of pottage, catch phrases

they hungrily devour, like conservation, love

thy neighbor, pipes of peace filled with

a fragrant mixture of nicotine-free grass and

decaffeinated coexistence

 

In the center an amorphous mingling of small groupings

the reconstructionists, forever breaking up, reforming

into new allegiances with modern sounding names

and slogans cut and pasted from supermarket fliers

temporary leaders in a dance of frenzied

musical chairs

 

Clerks sit at tables shuffling papers

postmen, educators, butchers, common people

promoted from their regular occupations for a day

to officialdom who on the morrow will return

to swindling, shortchanging and teaching well known hoaxes

 

You stand in line to do your duty thinking perhaps

this time it will be different, up on stage the opera

goes on, a landowner has just shot a greenie, blood everywhere

paramedics enter from offstage, remove the body

 

And then you wake, the alarm clock’s ringing

it’s election day you need to vote

maybe this time you’ll just give it a pass