"Path of A Possum" by Gordon Marshall

Illustration by Samantha Scott-Heron



II

Now that the Cold War
Has witched the polar ice cap
What flows through hot hands?

Water of debate
With which combatants wrestle
Hand to hand to jaw

Push-pin on the map
Pulling pin from the grenade,
Socialism good

Yet so close to graft,
The battle itself becomes
Incorporation

Of the philosophy
That does so much for the fancy
And the drive.

One, more to the point,
That did such good for global strategy,
Unmasking Soviet imperialism

To Cape Horn:
It wore a channel, a canal,
However much it cost,

That saved the new Magellans
From scurvy before the mast
Taking up anchor in ice…

To battle against Islam is insane,
The mad feeding the mad
In a firewall that folds the fire

In itself, its own
Armageddon.
There is no mental value in crusade

Or worse, its double
The crushing of Asiatic splendor
That justifies whatever goes by holy,

In the name of the holy,
An evangelical absence of imagination
And wonder, in a Disney costume

Without the touch of Walt Disney’s own hand
Making the cartoon conscious of itself.
It’s a child taking the sugar out of his candy

And licking the lollipop
To spite the kids who don’t have one,
A kid who breaks his best friend’s Tonka truck

Because he’s sick of playing with it
A 64-year-old adult
Who still draws in coloring books,

Careful to stay in the lines,
Crayola sheep and camels,
The camels colored wrong.

It’s not the cause Walt Whitman
Nursed the Union for,
Sowing up skin and flesh in tents

On the Susquehanna,
Not the cause the South still hates us for
Voting and seeing red.

It’s division and indecision
Masked as incision,
A pyramid scheme in the land of pyramids

Reducing men to worse than slavery,
Policy that enslaves its makers’ minds
As much as their minions,

Rust that feeds on itself
Oil that runs away
Like rabbits.