Here's the poem promised in the previous blog. Happy New Year 2013!
The Automaton at Sandy Hook
The Automaton at Sandy Hook
(in memory of the 20 children and 6 teachers killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on 12/14/2012)
He has our natural features
and hails from the same species
he has our smile and creeds
and pathology of the soul
and the greed for vanity’s sake.
He’s different the experts say
but not that much from the Enabler,
he is illogical says the Dialectician
and insane concludes the Psychiatrist
but not that much from the Mother Cell
the nourishing source
the germinating seed
the empty space here and there
even within the friendly enclosure
the furtive look of the neighbor
the effort to avoid all contact.
the empty square
seriality at the neighborhood level
like I saw it in the South End.
He is the apple fallen near the tree
the product of the chemical mix;
he is NRA, the Congress and Wall Street’s
combined voracity just like larrons en foire
to create Macabral and Maldyòk.
He is you and I assembled
in automation made fate
and faith in the Market’s goodness
in the gun’s good feeling
and its mythologized lore
the Second Amendment made fetish
of a nation guided by high valued imperatives
of the Military Industrial Technological Complex
and desensitized by mediated hypes
by the Nintendo’s procurement of pleasure to kill
the thrill of the murderous instinct
the lost spirits already perturbed
would find solace in madness
a shorter distance to salvation.
No! He is not the Other, the killer,
he is not even a stranger
he is part of a whole
prototype of a rational scenario
perhaps your existential denial.
The little fan of the New York Yankees
who refused to leave home and yet
still getting the excitement rolling
in the schoolyard and beyond;
the little beautiful darling, smart light
and pride of her parents
they had not had the time
nor to have or to inspire hatred;
they didn’t ask to come among us
still they took pleasure and reveled
in the happening of the moment
in the miracle of growing and learning.
“We cannot go back to the school,”
they said, “we don’t have a teacher anymore.”
Other teachers are trapped before death
and yet still trying to save their pupils’ lives;
parents who will never see them
their memories haunted by every instant
that preceded the fateful morning.
The most evil emblem after all
despite images of gunman toting gun
is the quiet of corporate input analysis,
the invisibility of arms-profiting dividends
the big guy that pockets the plus-value
from killings and mayhems
from families in pain;
the honorable entrepreneur hero
who produces a high-tech producing factory
that produces the AR-15 style rifle
and the elegant, sky-lurking drones
that kill miles away in the comfort
of the peaceful father in a US suburb
in the invisibility of the distance.
They hire MIT geniuses for maximum effect
those kill as magicians do
to erase all links to physicality
as if God himself had conducted the action,
metacosmic fluidity guided by laser,
and yet the blood spilled is real,
real red blood of the villagers;
they kill, the drones, with an impunity
more impenetrable than the Newtown killings
those have never paid for their deeds
because no deed was ever committed
in the absence of accountability.
Killing is never justified
although it always has a context
even a nourishing matrix
and a bad attitude
and a huge arsenal of means.
Even Halliburton which sells arms
and oil and illusions and cynicism
in the same package is innocent in this scheme:
the soul of the country wants it, they say,
the Founding Fathers wanted it, they say,
major national interests want it, they say,
it’s the continuation of the fairy tale.
They kill for the Empire
as for the nation-state
for the honor of the family
for the decimals on the bank account;
they kill because they have the means,
beautiful garments for social engineering.
Before all the tears will have dried off
and the spotlight changes focus
and the next mayhem occurs
and the memories of the twenty-six
evaporate in the air and Walmart registers
its nice cut in weapon sale
and the maniac gets to be happy
with his beautiful dispenser of horrors
and the mayor gets to show magnanimity
confronting a danger minutes after the fact
and the Guns Producer Industrial Complex
shows robust elevated patterns
and the Psychologist shows, immovable,
confirmed tendency to deviance,
hate of the mother and her doubles
and the children, product of her matrix:
casualties of madness
also of living cost challenges
innocence perished in Hell,
that’s what these children are
in the objective meanness of Globality.
They are not rare artistic marvels
for the sake of beauty, the weapons,
they are instrument to an aim
regardless of the original intent;
their function is to kill
and ease up the labor of God
manifested in sport killing
in political killing
in Mafia killing
in killing for the pleasure of the libido
testosterone in chute libre.
I invite you, my friend,
to stroll along the river way
on a full moon any night
when a warm, caressing wind penetrates
the instant, oh eternal instant!
I invite you to join in and rejoice
of the splendor of the space, its smell,
I invite you to let loose
of all the links of horrors
and the false stress
and the appetite for hideous thrills.
Before Newtown there was Oklahoma City
there were Ken State, Waco and Colorado
there were Wounded Knee and the Negrier
there were My Lai, Abu Ghraib and Fallujah
there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki
there were LaSalin and Site Solèy
all memories of past thrills.
(The children would not have died in vain
(The children would not have died in vain
if we approach thoroughly the calamity
and its many facets; often the absurd is the problem
that has eluded conscience’s penetrating gaze.)
These little cadavers conjure you to close down
both the engines and the sustaining source of Hell;
they conjure you to sanity’s road in the face
of madness and cold-blooded interests;
they conjure you to utopia
they conjure you to elevation of the senses.
-Tontongi, Boston, January 1st, 2013
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