City of Legends

 Yes, inspired by Robert Oppenheimer’s personal translation of the Bhagavad Gita on the occasion of the Trinity test of the first Atom bomb.  We do not need guns and bombs and tanks and napalm and poisons and weaponized diseases to kill.  Only lies.  When we turn Words, with a capital "W" into just "words", we diminish more than a single letter.  We diminish ourselves.  This is dedicated to my friend and brother in poetry Larry Jaffe.

I am become man, the destroyer of Words.
I will bend your thoughts to my own purposes.
I will eat the soul of your dreams.
I will barter for what I want with what you need.
I will justify myself in flags and books and fire
that bleeds into the skies of poorer peoples
and their waters and their lands, that I might prosper.
I will lie to you when there is no need to.
I will fall upon you when peace is the only way.
to resolve the conflict of ideologies and theologies.
I am become man, the destroyer of Words,
who mocks the purposes of a benign God
who takes many forms and facets to teach us
to reach us with the sanity that, in our vanity,
escapes us, rapes us of the innocence of peace.
I strike from the corners and the shadows,
proud of my conceits and deceits, my heart beats
with a black and bitter rhythm fashioned of bile and guile
that I will explain away as necessary to a higher purpose
that I lack the soul to recognize as I kill it with honed irony.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.