Young Writers Society

In ecru tanks they travel through the lands
of roaring flax
in arsenic search of machines
that pump through crust hungrily.

The thunder echoes:
there is no rush of rain;
a soft reverberation at first,
brushing through the sand,
And then the massive machines cease
in the face of those Americas.

Clay-creased faces look up
to the tanks, turn the sky lime.
they stare with pixel eyes
and yell sepia words full of fear:
like a disease, it spreads.

The second rumble
ejaculated from the click of a rifle
in the brown hands, almost black
repeats itself until the tanks raise their own fire
and death onto the crashing machines.

The shots ring through the indigo air
until a first man dies in obsidian
falls back from the tank
crimson jetting out in all directions
a scarlet stream through buff sands.

Screaming—
it ain’t over yet—
tanks hacking into metal
bullets tearing white skin
the Arabs are fearless
but they are full of black
Fear.

While the families in rich Florida villas cross their pale fingers
over their 60 blaring inches of azure Mediterranean conflict.

They don’t know their men are off in the golden desert
in their little ecru tanks
still crimson from the fight,
red-turning-scarlet-turning-puce,
dead like the 8-year-old girl
the Egyptians or Pakistanis raped and killed.

But still all the Arab men are dead,
and all the American men are dead,
and the cars continue to roll
down Manhattan streets
the oil boiling in engines, smoke swirling to the sky.

All dead under sallow sun
because of our addiction.

The children and wives in puke-green huts,
still thinking the husband is pumping honey
from the ground.