The lights are all red for us now,
red of Red Square, of Red China, of rage,
of Khmer Rouge and red shield of David,
of rockets’ red glare, of Mars,
of blood, of red states, of viscera.

What can we call them? Criminal is kind,
kleptocrats to the point,
misleaders, child eaters, rapacious popes of depravity,
pederasts, rat whisperers, fascists,
chiselers, globalists, a free market, a new world order.
They are the fake evangelists; they are the iron triangles;
left or right, sheep or wolf,
we have a soul and they want it.

Look here now at this red light
just past the mark,
we who are about to die beat the last drum,
stand in the lintel of a door,
look into the arroyo at a new American century
colder than the coldest heart,
blacker than black water,
they are journeyman players in the great game
and the whole planet is their prey.

The dead know good from evil,
The dead and dying birds know.
What is begun in light continues in darkness.
Ask the dead in Haiti piled and picked over
by fat dogs and swine, Ebola’s dead hosts,
a red milky way of dead Arabs or
unlucky boys and girls
spent by avuncular monsters.
Ask the dead for country or family
and those whose heart or mind
effortlessly stopped if it was good or evil.

Death is gold, money is time,
and time is the destroyer of worlds
said the old Hindu gentleman.
The red lights give way to a New York hurricane,
a California drought where bad weather
becomes good news for us because the wetiko lies
will not hold  against a trouble planet,
we who will pay any price for justice
will not pay for the blanket that infects us,
and this changes everything.

Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko:  “To the Cree, and most Native North Americans, greed was a      serious psychological malfunction.  The Cree called it wetiko.  Native American      philosopher Jack Forbes explains that the overriding characteristic of a wetiko, a Cree      word literally meaning ‘cannibal’, is “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal.”