Ham & Auschwitz

Shame chokes on its homegrown tapeworm,
Belittling hard fact & all the ways to avoid a harder living;
Perilously close to total burnout,
Yet bought by the same lukewarm
Promises that fed the informant’s death-row appetite--
Full partners in most of the crimes of the century
that mattered

Conspiratorial mystifications enclose all
doomed to repeat them as anything more substantial than soundbite
Crucial evidence litters steel hallways plastered
with slogans fallen out of all
favor with warlords solemn as monk’s shadows,
All following the most illustrious pedigree beyond the bulletproof halo,
Corresponding with all it left to the wolves
& gasping its mutations into the throat of every undesired host;
Shaking off the shroud that once bound it as airtight as its aspiration
to hear no evil not of this world;
To obliterate all remnants of a gene pool
Inscribed for all time with the schoolboy’s heart and arrows,
Promises as invincible now as they were inspired then