Soft Money Dry Bones Lyrics

1.
the bones testified. ezekiel cried,
"some calcify right where they preside."

and in times out of mind, times
whose seeds sulk in sewers, unsown,
times to which too much song replied,
"we'll understand it better in the bye and bye,"

the bones arose through a west oakland dig
of a cottage slum by then long dimmed,
and near laughed themselves alive at how
a simple thing like a freeway-to-be
so turns their subtle lot.

likewise, an actor of the sub-silver screen mines
ascended the highest office aloft,
and with a backbone's lack to the huac bone,
a front-pocket blacklist fanned his flight.

memory screwed with a silencer, but
it fled by the light step with which it struck.

o the jury box bones heard ezekiel's cry;
"some calcify right where they preside."

2.
soft money, into the beating blood of all law, quietly
dissolves.
dry bones recruited outside of a mall for real world:
kabul.
"hard target," or "the ossifying process of a
collateral catch-all."
...a mercury market of which cola and oil are but droplets of a whole.

3.
the swift boat veterans for truth adrift
since '74, unmanned and on an indifferent wind borne,
a three decade shift on a returnless storm,
when, of a sudden, a dark call sounded off-shore
and stirred the bare bones of airtime paid for.

as the sea hurls waves, our wars, ceaseless, toss
into suburbs the half-present, the fractured,
onto cold curbs the half-absent, the shattered,
or into black marble glossed a backlog of loss.

a second coming ever cornered the country of the young.

4.
a gallup poll of dry bones published overnight...

a marine dinner theater: a cast of bones,
white as last moons, on a wide stage of glass.
saddam's saluting statue in the fatal fifth act,
face fitted with a flag-knotted blindfold.

a stern king kneeled into court tv,
summoning a silence so soldierly.

the bones, they gathered on their gated lawn
where a name unbound into stone is drawn,
and marveled themselves alive at what multitudes
an invader, blind, exhumes anew.

2e7260593e9c15267bca7a8f224dc90e