I am become man

I am become man, the destroyer of Words.
I will bend your thoughts to my own purposes.
I will eat the soul of your dreams.
I will barter for what I want with what you need.
I will justify myself in flags and books and fire
that bleeds into the skies of poorer peoples
and their waters and their lands, that I might prosper.
I will lie to you when there is no need to.
I will fall upon you when peace is the only way
to resolve the conflict of ideologies and theologies.
I am become man, the destroyer of Words,
who mocks the purposes of a benign God
who takes many forms and facets to teach us
to reach us with the sanity that, in our vanity,
escapes us, rapes us of the innocence of peace.
I strike from the corners and the shadows,
proud of my conceits and deceits, my heart beats
with a black and bitter rhythm fashioned of bile and guile
that I will explain away as necessary to a higher purpose
that I lack the soul to recognize as I kill it with honed irony.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
Inspired by the socio-political works of my good friend and brother in poetry, Larry Jaffe.