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Clayton Eshleman A Question from Gerardo Deniz

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"Sabes, imbécile, cómo acaban sonando 500 severidades consecutivas?"
They sound like the boots of pallbearers during a parade of
       flag-draped coffins,
a pathetic or inspiring clompathon
depending on the way one feels about
500 refugee tents scattered about the destruction of Fallujah

       or a recent dispatch from Dahr Jamail: "an Iraqi friend of mine who is a doctor in Baghdad told me that when he was in Ramadi yesterday, US soldiers attacked the Anbar Medical School while students were taking their exams. As he said ‘They (US soldiers) smashed the front gates of the school in a barbaric way using Humvees... and terrorized the female students while arresting two students while they were working on their exams. They then lay siege to the homes of the dean of the university, along with homes of lecturers, even though their families were inside.’ "

                     500 consecutive brutalities.
5000 consecutive lies. 50,000 Americans
packing a Colorado Springs evangelical superstructure praying for the Rapture.

The sound machines Israelis are experimenting with,
where the drone drives your organs wild and if not turned off tears them apart.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine: the absence of evidence is not
       the evidence of absence i.e.,
no weapons of mass destruction found =
immense unfindable quantities of them.

As for climate change: shall we re-sacrifice a few mammoths?

Cartoon of Aztec priests rolling a nuclear bomb up a pyramid,
       ripping out its plutonium heart.

Gerardo, did you know that just 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 biggest
       fortunes (worth a total of $1 trillion) would be enough to pay for the education,
       food and basic health care for the planet’s entire population?

Believe in the footprint in Mali that contains a village, the dark parts animal manure.
Believe that a life, a community, could flourish somewhere, without American
       intervention.

Dahr Jamail (21 June 2005): " ‘We were tied up and beaten despite being unarmed and having only our medical instruments,’ Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi, a doctor who was present during the US and Iraqi National Guard rain on Fallujah General Hospital told reporters later. She said troops dragged patients from their beds and pushed them against the wall. ‘I was with a woman in labor, the umbilical cord had not yet been cut,’ she said. ‘At that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the National Guards to arrest me and tied my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver.’ "

Anal epoch, millions with their heads up their ass,
patriotizing the shit they see
spread by our junta’s appetite.

Tonight the color of the sky is infested, radiant with stealth.
So why do I not stand on my corner with a sign, why do I burrow here?
The trajectory of writing: gouged stone, cuneiform, pen, Microsoft word.
The testimony is caught, a phantom, between the exploding body, news, and being here.

My eyes roll back and I see, through the periscope of my skull,
a red churn, fire igniting dew.

Infuriated Botero has for once got it right: the tortured fat of Iraq,
blindfolded, hands tied behind, writhing on Abu Ghraib cell floors.
A bleeding goliath, hanging by his wrists, dressed in pink panties and bra.

I think of you, Gerardo Deniz, in Mexico City,
behind your wall of a skull rack spiked with Coca-Cola shards,
writing your visionary, daffy, meticulous poetry,
snacking on larva bonbons, converting your passing into canine jerks, and,
whenever she struggles up to achieve pedestal,
breaking the legs of glurge.

This material is © Clayton Eshleman

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