The Secondhand
From "At The Edge Of The Riddle"
By Jack Joseph Smith
The Secondhand
These purple waves of killers
across the regretful clouds
The loudest colors of the land
spot the religious sand
The savage young men are dressed
for the desert, and every desert
is in their mind
They think they are on horses
instead of machines
And they believe that their hatred
has churned into the voice
of an inner god
Raming the rod
Cracking the staff
The farmer has lost measure and choice
His family's waterless thirst
is their throats split in half
As the purple ghost sings
"This slaughter is easy for me
I can slash this sword into a dream
It is just a knife without a tree
Machete child you've seen everything"
Once green ground now discolored
The hard red sun
and the thick slick water
Their floating does not favor
and is not familiar
to the damaged myth
father and mother followed
To be gone
On the far side of slow motion,
without a camera or sound
They reach for their own
And risk their heart
And offer their hands
The limbs madness takes
quantified by the pound
This twisted anquish
This satantic issued
sorrow to see through
this violent lens
The distruction of the first souls,
decreed simply because,
from the beginning of man,
they never wavered from grace
Just the word insidiousness,
even absent of assistance,
has a certain sword
of terror that swings
Through the sleeplessness,
and the damning of the dark
At the massive edge
of life and death
All appears to be a trick
A glimmer.
and the scourge arrives,
at the quick
This devastation so sinister
Spread as a terrible spill
over the lovely and lonely Savannas
The sweeps of the villages
into the hiding hills
The image is of the wild animals,
standing in rows,
bewildered and untouched,
while predator hell continues
on by with its priorities
When the other world labors your bones
It is the hatred in our soul and sense
When we wear the black rocks you rinse
That you should be the ones left alone
The shrill and the kill cutting like cane
The centaur's strut across the southern plain
Stretch the Sioux from where our own were slain
Seldom seen a tear drop from the starving sane
The children are the secondhand
Across their immense land
One by one they do not glimpse
The reason why
Their's is the end
of all our time gone by