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.