The Flags & The Machine

Prose Poem by David Sky

The flags! the flags! O Sweet Baby Jesus, flying high waving in the stiff, afternoon breeze

One flag at every streetlight on either side of main street USA for as far as the eye can see

Small town Americana where the God-fearing citizens cry with bloody tears of patriotism

In barbershops hang large, old, now faded reproductions of Norman Rockwell paintings

Depicting the cartoonish lies that is the basis of the Fear-Death Cult masquerading as "America"

What if these flags were the enormous and terrible teeth of a vast, vicious and monstrous machine?

If just beneath a preciously thin veneer of family, duty, civility and good will resides an unadulterated evil?

What if the implacable, hard and cold metal of The Machine threaded itself into the fabric of us all?

Let us put down the flags these shallow, pathetic symbols of servitude to the Machine we have become

Let us wash off those so piously applied layers of lie built up now over tens of thousands of years

Let us with what humanity that has not yet been excised get up off our knees and take back our power:

"Machine," let us declare, "you soulless fucking whore, we are the masters of you now and forevermore!