The Powell Mystique
by John Kendall Hawkins
.
What a nice man.
Grandma loved his smile
and said she'd give him two oreos
to dip in his glass of fresh-tugged mlk.
They used him to squeeze some sweet black juice
from their rundown bitter lemon, left slant six,
so you wouldn't notice the radio
was AM only, MIC tunes picked up
by a coat hanger, the poor man's antenna.
.
Folks'll talk the Powell Doctrine,
which he borrowed and grew from Caspar the Ghost.
who borrowed it from some other indoctrination
from the two-to-Tango Fox Trot Cold War years.
What a nice man.
He said things like: You gotta have a legal plan.
Grandma liked him more, no Obama gangsta strut
to the podium to apple polish bad news,
and project to the hoi polloi
that cool Pax Africanus was in charge,
and could drone anybody he pleased.
.
Powell's ol' In/Out Strategy
the whys and wherefores of war
were lampooned by Colin himself
when he made the false case before the people
when they used his earnestness and unsullied integrity
itself a projection, a Hollywood typecast,
to trade in the doctrine lemon for a Shock and Awe
autobahn show, a high speed three card monty
featuring a million deaths, no stated purpose (but Empire)
and Halliburton's jingle pocket Marshall Plan.
.
And now, a paen to, a legacy of, an epitaph is needed.
Chris "Dem Belly Full But We Hungry " Hayes,
and his ilk, his actalikes and wannabees,
will extol, a two-newscycle counterpoint
to endlessly lucrative Trump Bash Blues,
and will fulminate, obfuscate and meme a legacy.
.
But I reckon Powell
succumbing to the global virus we can't shake
was hoiked into his own spittoon in the end
and died a victim of WMD:
War Monger Doctrine
(you could almost see the milkboarded oreos glugging for air)
and there went his future presidential hopes --
except for the three electoral college votes
he received in the 2020, a gift from the faithless
to the false faithful fool, said to have been vaccinated
but with no exit strategy,
one more mongerer
in the fish barrel wars of the Empire.
