Indescribable joy befalls me,
felling my weak-kneed spirit with all
the manifold swiftness of a plague,
or an unholy war’s worst airborne
illness, devastating my being
by releasing it from its prison
of existential wilderness with
pine-scented deforestation, fresh
incense and pathogens mixing in
a chorus an airport terminal,
the cavernous wealth and majestic
reverence of which, no heritage-
listed cathedral can rival, this
aching Capitalist temple which,
in five or ten minutes, terrorists
will trample, tight aisles of exiled
travelers and pilgrims colliding
with loved ones and shrapnel, collapsing
in an unkind tomb no crypt’s crowded
bowels can compete with, its cramped piles
of skeletons scarred by smiles surprise
scatters over them, human wreckage
sown with a hijacked flight’s carelessness,
lives unidentifiable and
defiled, silenced not by centuries
but thieves, lone wolves from cold cells emptied,
ascetic demolition men home-
grown radicalism has splintered,
envious enemies of freedom
apple pie and nuclear families
wintered here, sons whose ravenous hands
twitch, eager with the fastidious
fingers of Didymus, diddling us—
Doubting Thomases uncertain of
what love is, sick fucks stealing from us
life, a failed crop brought up in our same
garden, raised on and starved by the same
myth, born under its stars and whipped by
its stripes, kids buying into, blinded,
and left behind by its white picket
party li(n)es, not partly but wholly
responsible for their crimes, collared
minds to shock desensitized, green and
ignored, the misunderstood herd by
soundbites, viral clips, and talking heads
misled, is it any wonder when,
detonating themselves, they act as
rapacious harbingers of a new
era of cowardice? bringing to
an end an unfailing fable their
martyrdom to which they phone in? bombs
freeing us all of this suffering,
our souls grateful to be shed of bones
and skin, no c(o)urse worse than a corrupt
government’s warrants blowing up its
most insidious institution,
this oblivion’s founding legend.