Barack (II)

by X

Upon the Occasion of the Abu Wa’el Dhiab Force-Feeding Decision

 

You are you are ever so

more or less ruthless and sincere.

The detainee of the mind writhes against the tube,

the thin tunnel-cloud of hate, the nasogastric

nightmare of thoughts stuck together like wet pages of a magazine.

The throne king, the wolves, the feeding chair.

Judge Gladys Kessler has lost her hair.

 

And I have lost my mind

in the sweet metal

meadows of our endless war.

 

I am a corporate person now.

 

I want to look in the black center

of it all, to push my fingers into the pain

like J Mascis or Sekhmet until what’s removed

is the feeding tube-like intestine of dark thought in the flickering

flourescent of Camp No, the wheezing of a drowning man

at the oval center of an office where they cannot bring

the body, the detainee’s body, inflated

with such light, such grace, completely free from the poison

of his own mind that sloshes

soundlessly onto the President’s desk.