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YOU HAVEN'T DONE NOTHIN'
by Chris Stroffolino

Welcome to that in-between crisis epiphany
When folks are shaken to the root
And may, if not for the news, question everything
Including the fingers they point like flags
Or even peace signs that run the risk
Of biting the hand that feeds them
Which may not be so bad
If we’ve eaten more than we can digest…

But even if I’m all thumbs
Curling fetal in me,
I point my psychic sidekick gun
No more at Bin Laden than at Bush,
Enough of a yippee if not quite a hippie
To allow you to say my bang flags, my blanks
Are more like flowers than flags on tanks
Enough of a punk and sort of a monk
To know that the working title for the Clash’s
Only top ten American hit (which “coincidentally”
Had anti-Arab sentiments) was “rob the cashbox.”

Bush, I know it’s as bad for me to single you out
As it is for you to single out Bin Laden
And I know you are but an iceberg tip
Of a military-post industrial complex
Symbolized by the three buildings whose fire
Gives proof through these days that you are still there,
Bigger than ever, a complex bigger and older than you,
Like Cheney perhaps, but bigger than him too,
But now is not the time to address the airy nothing
Of the faceless world incurious, and I’m sick
& tired of hearing your song…

And I could even grant your heart,
And the heart of those who bought you the election,
Is in the right place,that you truly care
About the safety of people like myself
Who may very well have been in the basement
Of the towers transferring from the N and the R
To the Path Train to get to their adjunct job at Rutgers
Had I not been fortuitously offered another job
Or overslept that day like my friend Fred…

And that you would certainly not
Want to be mistaken for
The kind of Christian who would crucify Christ
If perchance the second coming of the one and only God
Were to happen as you say,
And that that Bible you tote for the cameras
Actually says “thou shalt not kill…unless an Arab,
Or unless he, or they, killed first…”

But did they really?
I’ll let someone else fill in the details
With numerous historical examples
In which the people of your administration
(to say nothing of your family) were involved;
Suffice it to say I know
And there’s evidence,
There’s blood on your hands
And now it’s not just foreign, not just enlisted.

The chickens haven’t quite come home to roost
Because you’re alive, lucky as Fred,
Or just like Saddam
If not the Iraqi civilians
Too poor to outsmart your bombs
But they have come home to some who supported you---
Though probably more who didn’t
(since there were more janitors in the pentagon,
More clerks in the trade towers,
Than senators, lobbyists, and warriors).

And even if they were duped like my dad
Not realizing the reason he was laid off
Was close kin to the reason the stockmarket was up,
And even if I’m duped
By believing that killing the men
Who set on the men who died killing them
Won’t make things any safer for us survivors
And, if anything, could make things worse,
I know that it is not too cool to be ridiculed
(especially by most of the world’s population)
And that you brought this upon yourself, ourselves,
And that Wonder’s brilliant double negative
Makes me really wish you’d do nothing,
Make nothing happen like Auden (if not Pound’s) idea of poetry…

It may be perverse for me to suggest you submit
Your swords to Ploughshares magazine,
your warfare to The Germ, or maybe even Fence,
I mean the one you can sit on
Between isolationalism and imperialism,
More akin to the Marshall Plan
Than the martial law your urge on liberty.
But, failing that, spit your bile out in a slam
Even if the pen isn’t mightier.
Oh, be weak and squishy, like Falstaff
Or I as a lad when the neighbor boy came at me with fists
And though I didn’t punch him in the fist with my face
Iran home I’m proud to say
While the roots of the ugly tree my dad chopped down
Sprang up as 20 more---

We weren’t safe before, but now that we know it,
What shall we do? And why should we listen to you?
There’s no one else to listen to.
You have the answer, you got the cure.
The news is with you, but the becomes a
And I suppose your guess is more or less as bad as mine
As Thom Yorke holds his “let Ralph debate” sign
Like Dylan’s “Watch Out” or “Dig Yourself”
And I do, pausing for gold, pausing for shit,
Pausing for what I hope’s not mere wit
Or the “premature conspiracy theories”
A new friend accuses me of—

For I know that during the long lean years
That I have craved a stock market crash,
A disruption of business as usual,
And that there’s a side to me
That would defend the Unabomber
On the grounds he killed far less
Than he did as a cog in the war machine
At respectable M.I.T

And I know this could be treason
Were it not that I believe,
As you claim you do,
That killing is wrong
Even if by taking my position
To its logical consequences,
I’d probably be considered suicidal
At least in a society where the death penalty
Is more legal than euthanasia
So I sympathize and forgive
The man who kills in the heat of the moment,
In self-defense, more than
The political terror of the CIA
Or whoever it was who hijacked those planes
And may even (earth forbid) be forced into killing
If I’m not feeling particularly “unattached” to life

But you could counter, as you do,
That since you (stole, I mean) won the public trust
That you too are acting in self-defense
But it’s not the heat of the moment, you know damn well,
And you’ve been itchin’ for military action since the day you got in,
Pissing off China with spy-planes, Russia…
Now this, How fortuitous,
The economy: weak, your ratings: so-so;
The tax cuts didn’t do it. Wag the dog, folks will rally.
An old, old story, which Shakespeare doth tally…
Even if you didn’t set them on, or know in advance
As some say Roosevelt did about Pearl Harbor,
The CIA-trained Taliban, like Caliban,
Did learn to curse from the Prospero of the hearse
You drove, and drive, lacking the power to die,
Or even cry without giving our fears
More than the unjust ice of further tank-shaped tears

You can dish it out but you can’t take it
And this boomerang would be comic
If the chickens had truly come home to roost
And the hijacked planes would have only been filled
With masters of war, and some little bird
(illegal to feed in New York) would have warned
Each and every innocent civilian away
From the towers and pentagon that Tuesday day.
It didn’t happen, but the only way you could save your skin
Was to get blood on your hands.

The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend,
And since I do not know their intentions
I cannot say if they missed their target,
All I know is that they missed MY target,
Which was not you so much as the forces
(would they were farces) who speak through you,
Ignorant or evil I cannot say
And, as I question while I point,
Maybe I need to rethink
My desire to see the market crash
To disrupt business as usual
For I cannot say I’m glad it’s happened

But, still, I wish we lived in a land
Where the President wouldn’t have to wait
To his final speech to cop to the existence
Of a military industrial complex,
Where Kaczinski’s anti-tech and anti-war statements
Could get on the cover of the New York Times
Without him having to become his own enemy by killing,
And when I say you dish it out but you can’t take it,
I don’t mean we
Should be ‘strong’ enough to keep taking it
As much as that we should use this opportunity
To stop dishing it out...