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Syndic Literary Journal

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.

 

 

 

  

 

 

Compiled/Published by LeRoy Chatfield
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