Diplomacy VII - Death Tourism
So here and there, in these less than fun times, I feel the need to cynically, and some might say insensitively, talk about politics on the page. Usually, most of my Diplomacy series has two markers -
It opens with “I’m not a diplomat, I just lie a lot”
It goes directly to my drawer.
But seeing as everybody is already fighting on one street or another, I thought - why not arm myself with a blunt object (my drawer) and go online?
Results inbound -
Diplomacy VII- Death Tourism
Springtime is here, the missiles are in bloom
Ran out of Kiev, nearly forgot my tomb
Tel Aviv and Tehran just started to dance
I'd bring my dancing shoes if I got the chance
Washington is never next, Putin sleeps all too well
Somewhere, somehow - Khamenei is smiling up from hell
The whole world will look like Khan Yunus
A smoke plume rises from Nablus
Maduro on an overnight flight - eye covers ready
Cuba and Haiti, earthquake rockin steady
But I bought their freedom on a Saudi buck
And the UN never really gave a fuck
If you can't beat em - join em
Never again again
We don't ever gotta stop
As long as we cut the fault and bring a mop
So for the final time -
I'm not a diplomat - I just lie a lot
I'd stop but...
I've got no reason to.
The City of the Immortals
The City of the Immortals
Stairways in and out of my mind
An apple of the blind eye
Four faces all avert their gaze
Guess it all figures in figures -
I was never meant to understand,
The cave dwellers spoke of
Where the heart runs away from the hand
Do the walls hide them or protect us?
Mirrors that we reflect
Monstrously yoked together!
It all figures in figures
Purposeless ways purposefully wrought
The cave dwellers spoke of
An eternity they forgot
They live for forever
In what eternity would consider a day
And this, this they called reason
"This city, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence - the mere fact of it having endured, even in the middle of a secret desert - pollutes the past, and the future, and somehow compromises the stars! So long as this city endures no one in the world can ever be happy, or courageous. I do not want to describe it."
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortals (The Aleph and Other Short Stories)
Wargames
My teeth are bullets
Digging through my gums
My friends are memories
Left somewhere in the mud
My eyes are reticles
My solid gunpowder skin
Im a profitable abomination
One day you'll grapple with me, your sin
My fingers are bayonets
They do not caress
Come get rid of me -
Add another bullet to my chest
In me you see glory
In me you see horror
In me you see money
In me you see a rise
(...a fall)
So come throw your life away, child
Gamble on margins razor thin
You struggle and fight against your demons
But rest assured we will win
One Must Imagine Zeus Laughing
I hear it now ringing
Through this town where was once my life
I hear the arrows whistling and singing
Abject truths in this temporary lie
I hear it now ringing
In our failures and in our demise
Words with their wings torn apart
Never to reach the storied wise
Oh I hear it ringing,
From Macedon down to Crete
A most resplendent decoration
Over the battlefield of our defeat
Oh I hear it ringing
from the hills does it bellow fair
I hear our gods laughing
And see Aphrodite wash blood from her hair
(The title is a play on the famous Albert Camus quote “One must imagine Sissyphus happy”)