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.