SHATTERED

I should have known

The day I came home

Finding you all alone

Drowning in a blood-red sea

O broken mirrors.

Reflecting fragmented faces

Furtive, secret mazes

Disconnected places

Dark, empty spaces

Shattering all illusions

About the strangers

Perfect in the looking glass.

How could I have known

So far from home

Wandering on my own

Searching for direction

Reaching for connection

Imprisoned in a black-gray netherworld

Occupied by hooded demons hiding

From the mirror's lucid light.

-- Diana "Iyanna" Gwinn

SOFT TARGETS

They like the soft targets most of all

Stone-faced pilots Just doing their job

Raining death from above

Cluster bombs, brightly colored

Disguised like soda-pop cans

Explode in young, tender hands

Steel shards shot in the air

Rip through a bus filled with civilians

Shatter the supple spine of a 15-year old

Choruses of talking heads

As if in a trance

Regurgitate in unison

Smart bombs, surgical strikes

Deep penetration, collateral damage

While the war machine plays on and on

Another church explodes in Bombingham

Four little Black girls dressed in their Sunday best

Pastel pink and blue

Turned to charcoal burnt flesh

Police rejoice hi-fiving in joy and glee

A young woman, Tyisha Miller, lay unconscious

Her limp body they pumped with bullets

Just another death by cop

Radio-active metal streams gushing toxins

Hidden in copper IUD's

Invade warm, fertile crevices

Poisoning a woman's uterus

White uniform-clad medical professionals

Employees of the state

Inject death into the veins of a Vietnam war hero

Piercing his mother's battered and bruised heart

On the anniversary of his birth

A desperate mother begs on the sidewalk

Like frightened baby deer

Her hungry children hover near

It's a hit by US welfare deform

A contract on poor mothers and children of America

The blood of Palestinian children

Soaks the soil from which they spring

Israeli soldiers, God's chosen few

Obey orders from Tel Aviv and Washington

Cut them off and kill them

Before they grow

5,000 Iraqi children in 1991

12 years later, now there are none

Says Mad-lynn Albright, Secretary of Hate

It's worth the price I think, their biblical fate

A predator man lurks in the shadows

Heartless coward, dreams of power

Steals the innocence of a blossoming girl

Like depleted uranium bombs

Made in the home of the free market

Ejaculates contaminated waste into pristine virgin soil

Soft targets, human flesh and bone

Really turns them on

-- Diana "Iyanna" Gwinn