[Newspoetry] Senseless Wars: What Frog-eyes Say to Frog-Brains

[Donald L Emerick]

Anon: Aristophanes Seeks Best Poet for WarState
  aka: Bush-Rumsfield Aim 1990 Iraq War Reprisal

Senseless Wars: What Frog-eyes Say to Frog-Brains

What were Aristophonetic Frogs co-axingly saying?
Deep-voices issue deep-thoughts from deep-throats,
enticing natural poets into marshy ponds this night:
Search us well, perhaps, for their lost bottles of oil.

That's what I must feel, sense to understand,
Yet I do want to sense less senseless war
Though this time of the evening, once again,
they try to hush my mourning conscience,
to shush my speech when I, grieving, say
"This, too, shall have been a senseless war,
this croaking inhumanity in humanity."

War and its WarLords overload all senses,
Vehement stupe-factions support supine violence,
Silent majorities want not to know what censors hide,
Speak not on evils the right hand may be doing
Nor allow the left hand its vaunted sinister play.
Oh (be still, best ill) pinions cushion needled nerves,
Probing up pheromonic anxiety's spine to sever
Corpus callosum and, mayhaps, pons asinorum,
Disconnecting from give and take, ebb and flow,
Severing minds into isolated autonomous realms.
Independent hemispheres thus make shallow ponds
Leaving undefended senses defenseless,
Senseless from excitations of war's electrocutions,
Lightning burns out bridges of culturing balances.

When nerves are overstimulated, overwhelmed,
They fail to react at all; they fail as signal senses.
They merely ache, numbly, awaiting resurrection.
Dried-out blood-drives die-out among those bled to death
In coffee-colored coughing-strained coffin-covered wagons
Echoes tell-tale heart-throbbings: be still in empty rooms.

Those who frog-march grandly out in front of war
Confront us and stand us behind war, firmly croaking,
Of this as the most thrilling and exciting time of life
To burn competitively into fervored memory ala PROM.
Now is the Time when every mo(nu)ment is enlarged,
For Every Good Man is magnified hyperbolically,
When Heroes stand like Giants out on History Pages
Coming to the Aid of their CountryMan, der Fuhrer.
What, ever after, challenges our senses, less or more?

Cerebral Cerberus stands at Plutocratic Kingdom Gates,
Ceremonies sear cerebellum for insincere causa bellum.
This is croaking courtship of frog-kings for frog-queens
Proves reproductive croaking a pompous sense delight.

Watchman, what say you of this cyclical night to life?

Imminent Peril is War's WatchWord: NeverSleep in NeverLand,
Be you always already suspicious, be you ever-ready, ever-alert,
24-7: Seekers for their own pieces always prepare another war.

Survivors rule: Senseless war always happens to someone else
Because those who die become incommunicative, senseless;
They no longer open up and speak of our senselessness;
Having been croaked, they croak never more.  Incomplete,
Survivor Memories are left to tell biased tall tales of war.

If Reason could return to its senses from senselessness,
If Left could clasp Right again, to shake its empty hand,
Then senseless war averts as this frog-plague ends, again.

Yet, I have to say, perhaps, of what I feel was a sign to us:
When a Supreme Court kissed a Frog and made him King,
We should have known what Prophets of Law then foretold
By their simple anointing: we had lost to the bottles of oil.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

(Apologia PS: I say little of that mighty poetic contest in the Frogs,
but, the contest was rigged against Euripides, so I gamely say.  DLE)

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