Pizza and Justice For All

Pizza Bum$

Here come the Americans

Here come the victors

Here comes the military

With their fast food restaurants

Here come the brutish troops

Colonial history freedom fighters

Where once were vegetable gardens

Now poppies fill the fields

Golden arches climb ever higher

Best intentions pave the road to hell

Pharmaceuticals and satellite screens

Building hospitals on rubble

Scattered across an abandoned African landscape

Strewn in crowded rice fields of Southeast Asia

A million leaflets fall as vapours in a cobalt sky

Ambition drops food packages of federal dreams

A life securely wrapped in bubbles

Everywhere the plastic remnant touches

Reflected in the tiny tint of childhood’s eye 

Tattered limbs grasping wooden crutches 

Baby reaches for a shiny metal toy 

Left behind in a littered schoolyard

A present from those blinded wealthy 

Another plaything in the money markets

Brushes dust from ragged trousers 

Blows his little hand away

The clinic crawling with journalists

Evangelicals trailing radar drones 

Distant pixelated photographs

Three columns inch forward 

Cold leftovers and morning news

Kellogg’s with a gallon jug 

Just another article on the table

Thanks to a pizza bum 

That came and went

In puffs of grimy desert smoke 

No reason to return again

His sister stands shocked in awe

Dried flowers at her feet

Beside a grave along a filthy road

Drops salty tears in the dust

Emigrates to the other side

 The far side of the world

Marries a Yankee Doodle

Heroes for the cause

A pregnant pause

Buys a Chevrolet

Fills it with gasoline

Orders the spare parts

Now she has her pizza bum

She studied hard her brother would agree

Learned that language and chemistry

To do her part for future history

Gives herself to a pizza bum

In small town Stateside dreams

Wishing to return all that friendly fire

He beat the prisoners

Pissing on them when they were thirsty

Swinging chains and barbed wire

As festooned coronas

Thinking with homecoming eyes

Of his wonderful childhood

Full of freedom’s promise and surprise

The love of a saviour with bleeding feet

And gentle ways of mom’s apple pie sermons

Right hand covers a heart dedicated to a flag

Slinging hook and dirty looks at poorer souls

Each raised him up on Independence days

Hearts and minds are set in stone

Cut into the bark of family trees

The roots of evil spread like disease

When there’s innocent death
Out on the street

A nightmare echoes screams

The sleeper awakes

Yawns remembrance

Pours herself a cocktail

Nitrogen and butane

Everyone’s drunk from the same source

It’s mineral water and faith

Now the well’s run dry

All that’s left to gather home

Among the absent elements

Lodged in bone and brain

Shrapnel and terror

Is another surplus fragment

Of her pizza bum

*     *     *

Happy Christmas War is Over and all that .. this is a piece about revenge and the consequences of actions - it's the domino effect in flesh and blood .. salutations to another year of freedom and peace and justice all that .. Love.