by Ricardo Acevedo

All the Earth shall be filled with joy.

Though governments auction prophylactic to black markets
While matchstick baby heads and bellies gaze fly
Into clotted saucer eyes an atomic sun.

Though pearled fat farm children smug in
Cardiovascular disease, T.D.'s and Dodges, discard
Silken filaments of flesh (trembling, pin-boned,
Hard-memoried) on the slick doorsteps of veneered
Strangers.

Though free thinkers, loud speakers, prophets, drummers,
Dreamers are shot and brained on sidewalks, their
Tongues nailed to walls in prisons, disfigured,
Starved, beaten, scorched purple with cattle prods
And though lunatics range freely.

Though tribes are suffocated by a cities fall, falling, fall,
Down numbers loose digits all fingers point in curved air
Roil and blame.

Though in the cramped heart of courts, liberty, a
Commodity, is traded, bought and sold for those
Who got caught at the wrong time at the wrong place
Dialing the wrong number on the wrong color telephone.

Though trade winds and air currents blow poison fumes
And brown skinned sweat, all filled with anarchistic verve... lash out
Too many voices raised loud, just, thunder with no rain.

And though poets wearily obsess
Incessantly trace quadrants within parameters
Of barren inner landscapes.

There is nothing that you can do
To deny, control or prevent it
Eventually all the earth shall be filled with joy.

And the desert shall blossom as a rose.