Jonathon Jacobs Blows Up Stone Mountain:
The Second American Civil War
By Colorado Poet Robert Cooperman
Narration By Roger Netzer
After Iraq, my nightmares were IEDs
exploding me awake, but now it’s a fight
I can believe in, not a bogus war dreamt up
by rich crackers who hid from Vietnam.
I got sent back and back and back to the desert,
even after I’d stopped believing killing Arabs
was going to keep us safe from the Taliban,
and that life-taking was the only job I could get.
These peckerwoods in Guns for America
love symbols—their flag’s a semi-automatic
spewing tracers on a Stars and Bars background—
They’re about to get a symbol they won’t forget
for as long as they mist over at Gone with the Wind,
when their folks bull-whipped mine in Slave Times.
Stone Mountain’s scultpings of those Reb devils,
Davis, Lee, and Jackson—all on proud horseback—
are going to blow higher than a special effects scene
of exploding bridges, or anything I set off in Iraq;
and with them, there goes any thoughts this war will end,
with all my brothers and sisters dead, in two weeks.
But there’s this tiny warning voice in my head:
the Gun boys will blast something we hold sacred,
and on and on it’ll go: like Iraq. Best not to think
of consequences: just finish the wiring, and blow
this KKK-cliff I’ve hated since before I was born.