WMD: The Tiresome Story of Empire
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The Powell Mystique

by John Kendall Hawkins

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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.