Military Idolatry
(in the style of John Allan Wyeth’s This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets)

The old man wears a leather jacket — black —
to celebrate Fallujah, the assaults
he led in order to avenge insult:
The deaths of four Blackwater dogs of war.
These mercenaries helped make up the pack
of thieves despoiling Baghdad. Their mad waltz
provoked the inescapable result:
Their corpses hanging from a bridge. Therefore,
Bush sends in the Marines to teach Iraq
That protesting their emptied storage vaults
— or “some kid with a vase,” Rumsfeld would say —
brings on the bloody Mad Dog Mattis cult,
a “manly” mob of murderers galore
to trash a city. Such a price to pay.