MY KRUGGERANDS CAN’T LAST A LIFETIME
I have responsibilities.
Human beings I love depend on me.
My time machine has sprung a spring,
like everything is hurry up and wait
growled my Seargeant First Class prick.
How will we live if we grow old and poor?
Huge billboards advise:
BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT
JESUS IS ALIVE
Will he remember he was Jeshua
before he became Jesus and be able
to help my suffering people
when things fall apart?
Will we find food if we starve,
provide flammable heat for a fire
if we freeze, and supply tin for a roof
when rain and sleet may never cease?
My people who survived Buchenwald
were ashamed to tell me how hungry
they became—barely surviving on ants
and mice when the moldy bread
and watery turnip soup was gone.
Hunger drove them insane enough
to think the unthinkable—
like eating their fellow man,
and drinking their own piss
when thirst became a matter
of life and death.
I reach for God in a starless sky,
and feel ready to wring his neck.
Why can’t he see the mongrel’s snout
on the return of the Hun as soon as he appears?
There is no way to prepare.