THE FALL OF BAGHDAD
Today a statue in Baghdad was toppled.
The Dow closed down 400 points.
The ghosts of Johnson and Nixon howl
down Wall Street, trailing shredded documents.
The boy sitting on the head of Saddam
slapped the bronze nose with his sandal
all the way to his village square.
The Jackal of the Desert
finds hole after hole to hide in,
and our smartest, most blood-thirsty bomb
will not find him.
Poets, dead and alive, write letters of Concern
to the First Lady when she cancels her tea.
I heard Neruda and Machado were going to crash it,
clandestinely inserting pictures of the war into
the slide show of the White House Rose Garden.
Lorca hollers the loudest,
he’s seen this silence before.
The Whiskey Boys may be dead
but the Oil Boys are drunk in San Antonio.
They move markers across a map of the known world.Later