Walking Across The Blue Marble

Inspired by Phil Ochs, one of my favorite folk singers.

walking across the blue marble
like it was made of blown glass,

claiming it as our own like
the English when tea was
the most consumed beverage,

expanding our interests
like a game of Monopoly,
Life and Risk all wrapped
into one,

all American inventions
by the by,

but are they copying us
or are we copying them?

The Soviets,
The Nazis,
The Ottomans,
The Imperial Japanese,
The English pre-1950,
The Spanish pre-1821,
The Chinese on and off
over the last two thousand years,

this is political bracketology
at its finest, but the brackets
don't follow laws that are based
on powers of two just like
the ruler that Americans use
almost exclusively,

by being unique,

we prove ourselves to be like
everybody else,

and now Iran and North Korea
and China and Russia want to
be the cops of the world or
become the cops of the world
yet again,

and the dissenters within
wind up ignored or shattered
by the police state in power
because it takes a massive
landslide tidal wave
akin to the one projected
for the American coast,
the oriental side at least,
when the Azores collapse,

and it seems that the
police state remains the
most popular and therefore
powerful form of government
to rule humankind because
it takes a landslide to get
people motivated,

a landslide that murders millions,

but if it fails to occur on our shores,
in our own lifetimes,
why should we bother about it?

unless it threatens our own interests
because we wanted their oil first,

can anyone say Iran in the 1950's?

the blue glass marble will have
her vengeance just like the God
of the Bible will,

unless the blue glass marble
is a metaphor for the God of the Bible,

when it falls,

and falls finally,

it will be of biblical proportions

Author's Note

Reviews

[Neva Flores Smith - Cha..]

Powerful, Ken........took me a minute to realize that the Earth is the blue marble....awesome write!

[Ed Hart]

"political bracketology" is a natural symptom of civilized man in the collective...it's a critical mass kind of thing, the more so the more so...look at all those burned bridges...you spell it out nicely

[Divinity Sleeps in This]

The first 3 stanzas were awefully poetic! I didn't expect the piece to become so global, but political poem are so rare these days, I had to read it over a few slow times :)