Hope? Change?

Somewhere between
Blood and passion
There lies hope,
Stark naked and gaunt,
Scarcely recognizable,
For this world has died
Countless times in hope
Of being reborn.

Come colonizers,
Come marauders,
Come assassins
And come corporations,
Generals and presidents,
Kings and conquistadors,
Come with your vengeful swords
And your bombs of fury,
Come with your treaties
And your laws that bar
This weeping earth,
And like an afterthought
Comes this beggar
We call
Hope.

Hope for change,
For peace,
For a chance to bury
The dead,
To call out ancestors
Newly born,
For a chance to scatter
The flowers,
To mark life
With death in passing;
We hoped for change,
We at last
Hoped
Change
Would arrive
And not leave us
Standing at the station,
Waiting for a lone passenger
Yet to arrive.

Hope did change
From unfamiliar optimism
Back to familiar cynicism,
To the same old shit….
Change!?
More like
Changing the diaper
On this old man called
Civilization.
Hope passed us by,
Our votes cast by our hopes,
Passed by like a beggar
Getting only chump change
In a ragged cup.

And what of it?
We eat images of the dead,
We eat three meals a day
Accompanied by the filthy
Newspapers of the murderers
Who soil unknown streets
And invent new words
For murder.
The casualty of war
Has become just that.
Ain’t nothing casual
About becoming a
Statistic.

What is left
To hope for
Comes like a season,
Anticipated
Yet overdue
And never to one’s liking;
What is left
To hope for
Has yet a name
To identify itself,
Merely a distant object
Fading in and out
Like a mirage
Painting our collective
Dreams
That fade when we awake
And have to change
The diapers of our
Democracy.