Chateau D'If Guantanamo
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)

The Chateau D'If Guantanamo affair
Has thrown a spotlight on our soulless place
The ones that we're ashamed of languish there

Identities we've chosen to efface
The business of our state we privilege
Asserting no requirement to trace

The path that led us down to sacrilege
Denying human rights our forebears claimed
The depths of perfidy we daily dredge

Excuses for the human minds we've maimed
Implying guilt for something just inferred
Injustice only for the ones we've framed

No crime alleged; no evidence proffered
Embarrassments therefore must be interred

To show the world how much we value life
We throw it in a cage and lose the key
Imprisoned by our martial drum and fife

We do the Bulgar drills and pimp for free
Our army for the lowest bidder whores
And corporations follow camp to see

That they make whoopee hay on foreign shores
The fanboy fascists thrill to fantasy
Which makes more work for mom to clean their drawers

In prisons inmates fight despondency
In bondage for another endless day
Yet some found freedom in eternity

And robbed us of our use of their dismay
A glib and graceless ghoulish grandstand play

How dare they sneak away to their own ends!
Like George Bush visiting Iraq at night
Did they not know what messages this sends?

That even hopeless people have the right
To find a power in their own demise
That darkness can't obscure the awful sight:

The bitter truth that few will recognize
That some will die a man, not live a slave
What made them think that they could realize

A martyrdom known only from the grave?
Or did they simply fail to see much sense
In waiting for a justice that forgave?

Our jurisprudence pruned to prurience
Their deaths we've got; not their obedience

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006-2010