Detritus: Mal’Poetica

The poetry and lyric column of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Newsletter

**THE PARADOX OF VIOLENCE**

—by Black Cloud, Chief Poetic Justice Warrior of the C-of-C-C

[To be sung to the tune of “The Sound of Silence.” With no apologies to P.S.]

**************

Hello, violence, my old friend, We know he’ll never kill again.

With the D.A. softly speaking,

Said there was still room for plea-dealing.

And the sentence for that bullet in the brain

Will remain:

His victim still is silenced.

Resentful memes he learned at home,

In the streets, and all alone.

’Neath the blackness of a darkened lamp,

He turned his hoodie to the cold and damp.

Then your back he stabbed,

When the flash of a squad car light

Split the night—

He lost his gold from violence.

And in the courtroom light I saw,

Testament to blood and law:

Judges gavelling without speaking,

Jurors nodding off, not listening,

While liberals whined,

“It’s because we don’t care.”

But they don’t dare

To blame inherent violence.

“Fools,” said I, “you do not know—

Violent crime is all he knows.

Hear my words that I might teach you:

Violence also it will not flee you.”

But my words,

Like squib-load bullets fell;

They failed to quell

The violence.

And the people bowed and scraped,

To the fishy god they’d shaped.

And the sign flashed out its ‘sborning,

To the slaves it was still warning.

And the sign said: “The death of your wages

Shall be wasted on welfare scrolls

And tenement holes,”

Ush’ring in

Majority silence.

Yet from silence, some must rise—

Not with tears, but sharpened eyes.

Peace is not the gift of weakness,

Nor is justice won through meekness.

And the hand that shuns the sword may still betray,

When it turns away,

And sanctions violence.

[Black Cloud was turned on to the work of Edgar Allan—not because he liked the violence in some of Poe’s tales, but because it offered an education. His fifth-grade Catholic school teacher, Mr. Dylan—a man who taught something beyond the catechism—gave him a copy of E.A.P.’s collected works alongside an old National Geographic featuring a story about homesteading in Alaska. These two items set the course for his future self-education.

Mr. Dylan also deserves credit for beating the living daylights out of the kid who kept interrupting class. Black Cloud took great satisfaction as Mr. Dylan’s fists pounded the little cretin into the sounds of silence.

Sadly, Mr. Dylan died halfway through the term. This, and the fact that the supermarket stopped selling the weekly encyclopedia volumes at Lu–M, accounts for the gaps in Black Cloud’s education.]—The editors