Enemies List

The beak that wreaked havoc is pressed against brick,
As useless as the pistol of Bloody Bill Anderson
after his last Missouri rampage.
How many dreams in this Hannah-Barbera head
have ended with my fingers in the Gripmaster embrace
that bulges eyes, cuts tweets in mid-throat?
How many times have I roared at my pocket Kissinger
To add the next name, to start the next tape,
To find an effective new alias for vengeance
Only to mumble just under Henry's hearing,
"We could kill him, but that would be wrong."

A wish made manifest is vanity
But so is the hope for patterns in bodies
of dead birds, dead rebels
deleted names in the enemies list.

The funeral no doubt brings friends and relations
Armed with weapons creating a nail-gun chorus
Overwhelming my screams to my pocket Kissinger
Enemies large and small fly as fast as woodpeckers,
Who use strips from the list to line their nest.

Loring Wirbel
April 28, 2010

Thou Shalt Not, Except Sometimes

The State Department has taken a distinct and troubling new step by praising the assassination by car bomb of Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah. Not that I'd disagree too much, mind you -- the man who planned the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, and several of the Beirut Hezbollah kidnappings of the late 1980s, is probably indeed better off dead. A strict Christian approach to confronting evil would say that one can never rejoice over another's death. But let's face it, I was overjoyed the day Augusto Pinochet bit it, and will probably feel similarly for, say, Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney (not the president, who is too much of a bumbling tool of the powerful). But I know I'm wrong to have a "party on the gravestone" view, and it seems troubling that the governments of the U.S. and Israel would make an official statement to praise a murder.