Aristotle in Aurora & maybe earth is a he after all

By Bruce Goldberg, former member of SDS and Labor Organizer—his take on the shootings at the opening of the Batman Rises movie—and another poem about how humans treat the Earth..

 

Aristotle in Aurora

 

“The Good is that at which all things aim.”  Aristotle      

A warm midnight in late July;

laughter and the zoo-like smell

of buttered popcorn vanish

in the triggered click of an exit door.

In widening horror of round after round,

 bullets whip and spray thru the aisles-

a dialogue scripted

in the fiery tongues of hell.

 

Carpets turn red

and everywhere the howling panic

of disbelief shreds the night

In the morning over coffee,

 we read eyewitness accounts.

and wonder at just how

 familiar it’s all become,

how it’s all happened before.

But who is the Joker?

no telling really.

we don’t know;

we never do.

 maybe earth is a he after all

 

In Boppo Miller’s mind,

Magellan was the first to circumcise the globe.

I heard him say so in Mr. Barteau’s 10^th grade history class.

And he was right.

Who knew?

Magellan the mighty mohel,

hacking his way across the Pacific to the Spice Islands,

maybe stopping along the way for a sandwich and some fruit.

Magellan, the great Portugese penis carver

astern his broad four-mast ship,

knife at the ready,

performing the rite deftly,

like a sous chef dicing carrots.

 

Since then of course, the globe

has been circumcised many times over

so that by now it lay huddled and

shivering in a dark corner of the universe,

humbled to a quivering stub of a member.

And worn,

worn from the endless shredding of rainforests,

the stripping of earth,

from dirty leaky blowjobs paid

to suck oil out from oceans.

Magellan and sons,

tired flaccid old covenant-makers

with nowhere else to go ,

nothing left to explore.