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We Kill Ourselves By Andrés Castro

By The Rising Phoenix Review on August 1, 2024

We Kill Ourselves

We kill ourselves
more than each other
in North America:

the year Abu Ghraib made
news, thirty thousand
of us self-destructed;

in this gun-thick atmosphere,
sixteen thousand
pulled a trigger;

four thousand armed
homicides spread their own
strange currency.

So how natural to arrive
with pomp and circumstance
at a War on Terror:

make up for killing ourselves
more than others in this
Trojan horse silhouette,

by liquidating as many others
as possible in its great fantastic
shadow. Strategic killing

in noble self-defense,
for freedom, for democracy
is always a safe bet;

better this corporate concoction
require our armed forces suicides
to softly lay down;

best, in this naming of parts,
Special Army Interrogator,
Alyssa Peterson, be labeled a victim

of a "non-hostile weapons discharge."
Who needs to know she had confessed
her gross inability to stop feeling?

This poem first appeared in Counterpunch on 10.20.2014

Listen to the audio - 1:36

By Andrés Castro

Biography:

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in Poets & Writers Directory and keeps a personal blog, The Practicing Poet. His work appears in the anthologies Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police and We Are Antifa, as well as Raquel Rios' Teacher Agency for Equity. His work has most recently appeared in Counterpunch, Montréal Serai, Kweli, and New Verse News. Andrés is currently working on Militant Humanist, a project for poets, writers, artists, and others.