BOMBS RUSH IN AND MARS A SELF-PORTRAIT

He’s a corpulent banker full of pomposity,
with turkey wattles, botox jowls
and a Patek Philippe million-dollar watch,
who has the political clout to send young men
off to kill each other.
He thinks he’s tough with his puffed-up chest
hanging over a sagging potbelly.
A Mussolini jaw protrudes to hide the womanish
features of his baby face.
He dines on grapes and pomegranates and delights
on spitting out seeds on heads of all those before him.
He’s a vulture with a broken wing,
and all he can say is NO to life.
His marred mind is greedy, he never plans to die,
convinced he’s hammered into the brightest star.
He lives a life of sorrow with love that never was.
With no word for pleasure in his vocabulary,
disconnected from his body, passion escapes him.
He thrives on poison alone with an appetite for death.
He sucks on watermelon in a quest for sweetness to no avail.
He survives on bile, never heard music, never learned to dance,
and is only fully awake at the sight of blood, like a guard
at the crematorium who sometimes secretly wishes
he could burn on the other side of the locked door.
I heard that when aliens discovered planet earth,
they concluded there was no intelligent life present.
How right they were!