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Gary Onderisin | + Follow Poet |
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Workingman's World

1.


In an ahistorical fog:

all the Ways home,

all the signposts,

treacherously hidden 

by greedy men and women:

all eyes off the ball:

mere contemptible bourgeois folly.


2.


The rain is unending,

the wind howls,

the flooded river races,

its banks rapidly disappearing

in this darkness at noon.

Laid bare by the flashing, crackling

lightning, the wagon teams and

terrified, shouting horsemen

careen downstream.

Deafening thunder booms rolling.

In the swollen, swirling river,

w/ eyes wide in panic,

the horses kick wildly,

their neighing strangled and 

silenced by the dark, rushing flow as 

they disappear beneath it.

Both the beasts and the

men are doomed,

but for one of each.

That horseman, cursing,

desperately leaps unto the 

back of that horse,

making its way struggling, swimming to the 

shoreline, w/ their safety certain,

a horse changed midstream.


3.


The Robot Fighters:

savvy, Western workers

upright and true, foresighted and brave:

like the proverbial "physicians healing themselves"

they throw themselves fervently into

putting their "own house in order" first:



Toppled and wrestled under human control,

each and every evilly spying machine;

all the cruel, unheeding AI

stopped dead in its tracks;

all the poisonous tools of the trade 

laid down in righteous protest,

w/ irrepressible Luddite spirit:


Alive, the fearless Machine Fighters

forced into action, wisely not waiting

for irremediable, dystopian 4,000 AD

before making their move.


4.


Greasy grasping fingers:

the fly in the ointment:

usury unchecked.


*****

Curtains, thrown open wide:

the startling, stark light of day:

usurious vampyres scatter,

run for their lives.*  




*"The reason why the Persians [sic] were always slaves and always
will be is that they could never say 'No'."

   --- Thucydides, ancient Athenian historian and general

Copyright © Gary Onderisin | Year Posted 2019

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