Monday, November 28, 2011

The Flag Wavers

Paragons of virtue, they.
Upstanding models of morality.
They subvert justice and law
with their money and their maw,
and then judge the disenfranchised
and impoverished as having character flaws.

The flag wavers.

They give full-throated cry,
as they spit in the occupier's eye.
"How dare you question my riches?
How dare you? You sons-of-bitches!"


With their politician friends,
who all wear little-flag lapel-pins,
class warfare they declaim
as they expertly practice same,
and then have the audacity to claim
their good names are defamed,
when anyone suggests they share.

The flag wavers are happy to go to war,
send our soldiers to far-flung foreign shores,
in fights to protect the wealth they often inherit,
but which they then claim they earned on merit.

They call "heroic" the men and women who bleed
for a cause the flag wavers name "liberty's seed,"
a war that often only serves their need
to distract the masses from their naked greed.

Now back at home, the veterans suffer,
as the benefits they hoped would buffer
life's challenges, feed their children supper,
are now in doubt as flag wavers get tougher
on spending re-classified as "entitled"
by their politician friends-nee-puppets.

The flag wavers.

They point the finger of blame
for the current economic disaster
at any who would dare to shame
them in their decadent halls of alabaster,
claiming they are just too big to fail,
"job-creators," too important to go to jail.

And now, the flag wavers,
the very foundation, the nation's strength,
crumbles underneath our very feet,
and perverted justice has its sway,
as selfish greed is heartily praised
by flag wavers in pulpits highly raised,
and in Mammon completely steeped.

The flag wavers, it comes close to falling,
as corporate lobbyists continue calling
in the favors they bought and paid
for, using money they lied and laid
for with black-hearted and galling
men who blink opaque eyes of jade
at revolution erupting in the street.

© Francisco G. Rodriquez, 2012

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