by Steve Hellyard Swartz
My teacher wrote to me:
Appreciated the take on the beer murders.
Suddenly it's all about race again, though i suspect it never went away.
Again translation.
How do we communicate the rage that has become synonymous with living here?
I tried to answer his question but fell ass-over backwards into a poem (oops)
My reply:
Disguise, disguise, disguise
One mask for when we sit on the hill, eating lunch as we watch the war rage
One mask for this and that
All the time insisting that it's bad but it could be a lot, lot worse
And now the spectacle of the victimized white person
The fat, ugly, screaming, censorious white
The angry grasping fainting clawing white
Crying because he knows that there are millions out there who would happily see his war and his lunch taken away
Steve Hellyard Swartz is Poet Laureate of Schenectady, NY. He is a frequent contributor to New Verse News. Swartz is a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Patterson Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Kennesaw Review, and online at Best Poem and switched-on gutenberg. He is the winner of a First Place Award given by the Society of Professional Journalists for Excellence in Broadcasting. In 1990, Never Leave Nevada, a movie he wrote and directed, opened at the US Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
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