Isms

I heard you heard we all

heard music change

to an ism rhythm

isms bag us in plastic

throw us in landfill

applaud our shuttered imaginations

isms promise outer space and give us

laugh track sitcoms give us dead children give us

gods of war give us mirthless smiles give us faces

impaled on blue suits give us lapel pins carved

in bloody rivers running from a lake

of hope.

Isms teach mothers to wrap babes

in explosives teach children to buy

cock raisers and pussy wetters

isms free elderly from streams of piss

from excrement that death

is built-in obsolescence.

Isms invisible in mirrors

lick blood from all our highway gutters

all the broken windows all the shattered cities

isms feed furnaces of greed isms feed appetites

of wolves whose tongues lick angel words

from our headless corpses.