Revolution

In the end, the plague touched us all. It is not confined to those far away places. No, it turned up again in America, breeding in a compost of greed and uselessness and murder. In those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the young forever. The plague ran in the blood of men in suits who run for political office promising life while delivering death. The infected men machine-gunned people for an idea. They marshalled death through the ditches and through the mighty clouds up above God's green earth. The released it in silent streams and moved on while hospitals exploded with the mutilated bodies of our children and the green fields were churned to mud.

And here at home, something died. The plague moved among us, slaying the old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams. It killed the great brawling country of barnstormers and home run hitters. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism. Symphonies died on crowded roads and novels served as furnished rooms for ideology.

And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal the worms, and many of us retreated into a past that never was, the place of balconies in the sun where they believed life should have been lived. The place we have borrowed from our imaginations where we tell ourselves that if we could only go back then everything would be alright again.

We live in a smokey landscape as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed and the roadmaps are all lost. There are no polticians anywhere that can move us to hope. The plague recedes but it is not dead.

Where is our hope? Shake the bars, rattle the cages. Revolution is in the air. Can you feel it?