LIKE
“The blood of children ran in the streets/like the
blood of children..”
- Pablo Neruda
No other sound like it. Beyond even spy
listening devices. This sound that holds
us, like, “glued” to our screens, citizens
of a smashed republic. (Mussolini, unlike
any of us, saw a perfect cruel simile: a “rose”
of flesh erupting at a dropped bomb’s heart.)
Like beauty, unsouled. It is a tale told by an A.I.
full of cruel facsimile, signifying nothing. Nothing:
where the line of mothers, in prison drab, vanishes in transit,
while the one loud disembodied voice insists
on borders, between us – in our minds, where we
find out early what is alien. No crossing for us into
that other country, where blood runs as blood, as
the small unmarked coffins pile up. Counted like
our many “likes”, total’d little signifiers, faces of
those in our monitored protection – as we
are protected from these children, not ours. But “like”
ours, the way our own deaths are like, you know, death.
