Poetry By Michael Galko
A prayer to celebrate the deaths of awful people
Some will say you should not. That they have families who might remember
a firm loving hand on the head, a kind look, a thoughtful gift…
Families are no distinction in this life. Indeed, small kindnesses
directed at loved ones are no distinction. Conceiving and executing
the carpet bombing of a civilian population to achieve a geopolitical
strategy—this is a distinction. Organizing and celebrating the murder
of a democratically-elected head of state—this is a distinction.
In the Museo des Bellas Artes in Santiago Chile there is a piece
of art that diagrams what might be called a blueprint of death.
Nixon (bless his death) and Kissinger (bless his death) are the arm,
drawn in grey chalk on a slate board, that directs the grim reaper’s
hand as it acts through the fingers of the security forces of Chile,
which points to the named gunmen (this is a blueprint after all)
who shot those in the street who would defend their president
in the hours before his murder and in the days before the defenders’
torture and murder in the city stadium. All I am benedicting, on this lovely
week, let’s call it “Kissinger Death Week”, where our steps are light
on an Earth no longer weighed down by great evil, is… just let me know
where his grave is. I hope it will be in Chile or Cambodia. I pray for
the digging of a pit latrine upon it. So people of peace, when they need
to relieve themselves, can do so. Because there is so little relief
from evil in this world. My plan for sacrament is to gather some roadkill
on the way, to pour some cheap Chilean wine on the carcasses,
to piss on that pile, and then to light it on fire after a sprinkle
of sulfur and napalm. The graves of mass murderers should raise
a black foul smoke—should bear the devil’s footprint for all time. Amen.
The bus to Prague or the power of theater
When the coach crosses the border
everything is all newsreel—
black and white,
Chamberlain, tanks, 1938.
I recall the theater tickets
I once bought for my parents—
US premier of a Vaclav Havel jot—
just after the velvet revolution.
The play was like three packs
of cigarettes smoked in a small,
dimly lit room—agitated vinegar voices
parsing arcana lost on the free.
As the grey hills roll on
my great grandfather pops to mind—
he who took a bullet somewhere in Croatia
for the glory of the Hapsburgs
in the Great War. Then house prisoner in
Russia, waiting on petty nobles until
the revolution freed him to walk
thousands of miles back to his Slovak
village to tell stories of capture,
servitude, return. What if Christine Y.,
my Dad’s mother, had not
shipped to Ellis Island in 1923?
Would I be one of Vaclav’s strange
new beasts—some kind of Eastern Euro
girlpop throbbing on the radio,
zipping American tourists from the bus
station to their swank hotels in my taxi?
It’s all a show, the bobbing
Tiki girl swinging on the dash,
the unlit cigs dangling from his lip,
begging for the big American tip…
