happy poem of glorious statehood

let us celebrate replacement
with equally questionable
leaders parties and their hidden
machines agendas and arrogance
undoing the fabric and beliefs
undoing the trust and hopes
for reasonable profit expectations
—army as advance goodness
in public relations preparing
occupied for incoming business

let us celebrate our elected awfuls’
control of the nation’s re-imaging
repositioning downward pride
ongoing record of human wrongs
against people whose lands
we occupy wrong and not free
against women students workers
children artists and scholars
—let us not replicate khmer rouge
pogrom in land of red maple leaf

—Joe Blades