New Managers

They’re trained in such a way
that they march in lock step with each other
across levels and planes.

They’re ready for that moment
when the world blows the whistle and shouts,
‘Now! It’s all mine!’

At that time they’ll close ranks.
No one but themselves fill each battle line,
but there will be no battle.

It ended before the war was ever declared.
They fought it and conquered
for their master.

Their first forays were played
like silly games not to alarm,
yet we knew, and we played.

Dividing us or eliminating us who would not cleave,
their first vanguard itself fell, crushed under its own weight,
hideously unaware of how it had been used.

Now they ride above our heads
on airborne litters of their own conceit,
foreign masters of a primitive people.

Demand their objects,
command us how to achieve them,
little know what these objects really are,
little care what they command us does not produce them.

They force our meeting with them
like a bandit rapes a woman,
or a kidnapper a child.

Colonial peoples are no more than possessions.
They see us without acknowledging us,
they instruct us as if we were dumb beasts,
we can have no knowledge or idea greater than theirs.

‘Let the primitives have their mumbo jumbo,
their weird customs and styles,
we’ll pretend we don’t see them,
we’ll not let them know how much they scare us.’

White skins shine like polished shields under a glaring sun.
They blind our oncoming horses
that plummet riderless to the dust.

White is not a color of the skin but an attitude of right,
that knows it is born to rule and be sovereign over many heads,
preferably still on necks, but if need be, at their feet.

Astounded was I how this phalanx of men
made Amazons, but breastless, so easily slices in two
by tethered thorns it never prepares for,

leaving its myriads of shaven armpits
and smooth, athletic bodies with beardless faces
prey to its own terrified eyes,
revealing to them now what they must deny seeing.

Until the shout comes, ‘Now!’ and,
as it closes ranks as it was trained to do,
it won’t have heard the ‘It’s all mine!’
because it was never meant to.

Now back to the jungle, to pound roots
into something that can be eaten, without knowing how.
Colonial peoples are no more than possessions,
it never learned our language.

Use those white skins,
once used to blind the conquered,
now blind themselves as best they can.

The sun grows brighter and hotter than they thought possible,
and their eyelids shrink.
Before they would rather close them,
but now they can’t.

The last of us sank
below their commanding, all-seeing eyes,
just as their master shouted, and they saw us no more.