U.S. President Joe Biden has billed an image of a compassionate man. With the demonization of Palestinians and the full-throated backing of genocide in Gaza, any image as a compassionate is bankrupt.
Compassion Dusted
Thinking it’s just
Biden time
For the fateful elect
His own
Kind
Better won on won
Than as a hole
A veritable political die-nasty
If you will
Losing the human race
As much as won kin
As fore tolled
Buy blood only
Compassion dyes
That stain power
Of abetter whirled
Souled to the lowest bitter
The madness
Crushing stones of the desert
The folly of crossing an ocean
Parading reverent warship
Withholding all water
Accept tears of enemies
Looking back
At a fabled city upon a hill
US wed to a Lot
Of a salt
Satan sculpts a smile
Fore every doody-full subject
Everything ails looking up
From the seventh circle of Hell
With every manor of weepin’
US delivering
A future
Dissembling entire peoples
Picking won’s genocide with care
This poem has a few metaphors that might benefit from some clarification. The seventh circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno is violence. The last two circles of Hell are fraud and treachery. Just so you know what is coming next. America, with no small hubris, lifts itself up a city upon a hill, a biblical ideal. This propaganda is lipstick on a pig. Lot, with his infamous wife turned to a pillar salt for looking back on Sodom pining, was fleeing the city’s sin of inhospitality for wanting to “sodomize” a sojourner, a guest in his household under his hospitality. Like in modern times, many people mistakenly view rape as primarily as a sexual act rather than about violence/control and humiliation. Palestinians in Gaza are not free; they are under occupation. They are “under the care” of Israel (and US). Genocide, the lowest imaginable form of hospitality, is Israel’s and the United States’ sin. Compassion cannot be credibly purported in this explosive climate of madder and anti-madder.
