and the old hatreds
have risen up from under their rocks
where they’ve been hiding
taking a new form
they ooze like stale bile
flowing out of sewers
flooding the city and countryside
with their yellow muck
bubbling out of televisions and phones
there is so little to be said for it
it seems it’s always been there
like an old blanket suffocating us
from sea to shining sea
my how we’ve hoodwinked ourselves
into believing we’ve made a better world
but the battle lines have been redrawn
the violence seems so vain glorious
retrograde, we now stumble
for words of enlightenment
but there is only the ignorance and fear
that we’ve courted for years
a generation facing
a dark reckoning
or a cold, black end
to this idiotic myth
offering little left to save.
John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016). Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.
