BOMBS, or listening to NPR. I can’t tell. But it’s all about Point of View (a poem)

What is the distance between your eyes and your ears?
You can’t believe what you see but you know what you heard
from your desk in the computer lab, just off the cafeteria.

Someone said he thought it might be a sonic boom (all
booms are) and you swore you saw blood splatter on the broken
wire-window of the door your best friend just passed through.

Then, slow motion commotion in the little nation surrounded
confounded by bloodlust hate bombing everything in sight
welcome to the universe and the university

limbs, hands, fingers, lips, eyes, teeth, bits of recently connected
tissue pushed about. This is what it really means to celebrate
diversity. Only hate prefers this to the unity of an overarching
truth.

What is the distance between her head and the rest of her?
You step over puddled hemoglobin, stunned by the shape
an ideology can take, and you pick up something that doesn't
belong to you.

You make it through the rescue, the recovery, the search for
more weapons of body mass deconstructionism in postmodernity's
medieval nightmare, and you tell the radio correspondent that you’ve lost
your hearing, and you think you have lost most if not all of your
best friend

Hamas takes credit for this bold military strategy of delimbing

Jesse Jackson cancels his speaking engagement with the holy man
responsible for the spiritual nourishment of those who mix
C4 for teenage chests, of those who steal airplanes and offer
lesser worlds

And Imus mutters that this is insane, just all insane, wishing
Jesse would come to terms with his monumental embarrassment
NPR tries to find the sanity in both sides of the story
doing everything but a gestalt switch from Point of View to Point of View;
of course, everybody's right, if you just think about it in
a sort of prefabricated, modular way.

There is act, and reaction. And reaction follows the first reaction
the third follows the second, and so on, until it is all over
reaction

Then large chests heave that "We have got to get both parties to the table."
"We have got to remove blocks to the peace process."
(Yes. City blocks and concrete blocks shoved by bulldozers
or explosive moments like today's.)
"Hopefully both sides will learn from what has happened
here, and take the necessary steps to ensure that it
won’t happen again."

Didn't you say that yesterday 30 years ago?

(I smell the blood of students) shed in retaliation, or so the
Palestinians claim, for the execution of their leader.

While someone covered in prayer shawls and holy script
finds a divine reason for intervening in the rhythm of human hearts
as old Bedouin scraping flesh from walls like the remains of
van Gogh's gooey brush strokes
beg a simple question:

Where's God when you need one?

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.