Once for a Thousand Years (Butcher Bloc Bingo) 

Once a long time ago things got so very slow

Went down to Guantanamo and built me an Alamo

Built me an Alamo down in Guantanamo

To stand for the status quo to Tierra del Fuego

Saw a land called Chile, a man named Pinochet

Who behaved that way thanks to our CIA

Saw a ghost named Allende behaving so friendly

He was killing me gently ever so absently

Took one look at Brazil, the USA off the pill

Indians still to kill, still adding the bill

Saw Rio de Janeiro from the ground in a turbo

All the tinshack condos on Free Enterprise Row

Sailed to old Venezuela on the back of a white whale

Left a petroleum trail delivering the U.S. mail

Then dancing a cumbia went to Colombia

Quoting Rumi and creating Vietnamia

Cruised into Guyana on the back of a piranha

An unshaven bwana to gather the manna

Saw the old Amazon fight the personal liaison

From the side with the jam on for the battle with Mammon

Went to El Salvador found out what’s the dollar for

Fill the rich and kill the poor in a monopoly capitalist holy war

Inside our Honduras where our best people assure us

It’s safe for the tourists they'll scarcely endure us

Just got back from new Grenada acted like the Marquis de Sade

Used island for cannon fodder, killed a bunch of sons and daughters

Ran into St. Stanislaus on his way back from Panama

Reading George Bernard Shaw on his way to the Mardi Gras

Learned all about Cuba while watching the tube

A brainwashed boob sitting there in my cube

Tried to starve them out and poison their trout

That’s what we’re about while we shoot off our mouth

Given a stick or a carrot and forced then to bear it

Which one has more merit and which one would just tear it

Then consider it's your mother with no choice and no druther

And the same for your brother would you choose the other

Out in the side yard strolled the National Guard

Where the scenery is marred because justice is barred

Out in the side yard do not let down your guard

Some Alabama wild card bayonet you real hard

Back in the front yard all the media bards

Show you all the marked cards fill your head up with lard

Back in the front yard there are feathers and tar

Put your bod behind bar put your mind in a jar

Saw the gringos with guns fill up Greyhounds with nuns

Leave the land of the huns to sell hamburger buns

Met a man named Sam lost a gonad in Nam

Lost his nerve in Iran has a head like a frying pan

Met a great nation of sheep still fast asleep

Listening to some new creep up on top of the heap

Met a man named boy thought he was Tolstoy

Often mad and annoyed with some other paranoid

Met a history of lies of indivisible size

With footnotes and asides in whispers and cries

Met a humankind nearly out of its mind

Hitting you from behind taking what it can find

Met some fading dreams in some mixed-up schemes

still trying to scream while stopping midstream

Met a sad pacifist and a happy fascist

Who together found bliss reading Reader’s Digest

Overheard an old gringo who’d been living as a dingo

Reinvent a war game and call it Butcher Bloc Bingo

Gringo gringo gringo all in the name of jingo

You butcher people anywhere you can learn the lingo

Uncle Sam is damned so damned for its Butcher Bloc Bingo

B is for the Butchery.

I is for the Ingles.

N is for the Nihilism.

G is for the Gold.

O is for the Oil we suck from Venezuela, Ecuador & Mexico

Butcher Bloc Bingo

Soon you see where the recruits go

Where they will get shot and get jungle rot

Where freedom is not there’s cheap coke and great pot

And United Fruit’s corporate criminal roots

And mucho toot for the generals' mucho loot

It’s colonial booty our imperial duty

It’s ready fire aim in a genocidal shame

It’s a freeze frame of guilt and righteous blame

With massacres with specific names

El Mozote and others of infamous fame

It’s still cavalry versus Indians

And Calvary for peasants and nuns

A gift from the glorious pale nation

In its latest manifest dustbin mutation

It’s no wonder the peasants run

Here come the haughty free press puns

Bananas and nuns cocoa and the runs

There must be some other way to have fun

Than Butcher Bloc Bingo

Why the guaranteed calamity

And planned chaotic infamy

With zealous Christian infantry

So jealous of infinity

All counting each extremity

And with a banjo on each knee

To string along the not-so-free

Plain acting like a Yanqui

Yanqui, Yanqui, Yanqui

More stubborn than a donkey

You get the drools such able fools

And continue till you are the ghouls

Strangling your own freedom rules

And tearing down with all your tools

Gone to lengths that are so honky

Why are you like this Yanqui

Too fond of hanky panky?

Which are you Drac or Frankie

Have you lost the art or lost your heart

You’re leaving out the peaceful part

Why are you like this Yanqui

Are you asking for a spanky

What makes you so blamed cranky

Afterword
And not to shout but to leave no doubt

Our path to war's now a Southern States route

If you want to know what our wars are about

Just hear the fears from a good ol' boy's mouth

It's 'the enemy this' and the hatreds they tout

If they don't get wars soon just watch them all pout

peacetime for them is a long hard drought

And they're not alone just pick up the phone

Dial a number at random turn over that stone

Most people believe what they most want to hear

Especially the things that they most want to fear

They'll listen all day to a rational voice

And that night make an irrational choice

Still the new Confederated Heathen South
and its allied midwestern and western louts
have begun their own vengeful March to the Sea
having never learned how to really be free
and never confessed the grim reality
that they are still wrong and without empathy.

Larry Piltz

Summer of 1984

Austin, Texas

April 7, 2016 Indian Cove

Lots of little lime green caterpillars these days
inching their way up nearly invisible threads
twisting themselves back and forth higher and higher
climbing the equivalent of hundreds of stories.

Two swimming duck parents
lead five or six unfledged ducklings
to a small newly forming marsh island
teaching sheltering each day.

Sun is about to drop behind
the tall bluff across the cove.
The cove the heart and center
of mostly unseen life.

Duck family now moves along the opposite bank
then dashes exposed to the far side of the cove
ducklings in tow then darting here and there
all heading up the creek for dusk and seclusion.

Fish jump at water striders skipping along.
A few bats and small swept-winged birds
swoop after tiny flying specks of consciousness.
Merrily merrily merrily it's almost night's turn to dream.

Ah the first bullfrog herald
four or five warm-up tuning croaks
gets the jump on the competition
as sun becomes a backlit glow.

A slight chill breeze arrives exactly now
catching songbird attention and initiating conversations
among the canopy and from tree to tree
the conversants sometimes gliding to share a branch.

Kingfisher is first heard then seen
standing on the very tip of a thin bare branch
stretching outward low above the twilight cove
listening for commonality and direction

She pauses before launching laterally
and muscularly into the accepting air
on her acrobatic staccato twittering way
to her next standing appointment.

What We See of War Is Its Shadow's Reflection

The living cannot see war.
Only the dead can see war.

The living see only the reflection of war's shadow
even among the mayhem of ruined bodies, lives and countries,
seeing only intimations of war and feeling only an estimation of regret.

Only the dead see and feel war firsthand
and die with envy of those who have not yet..
The same can be said of life.

Larry Piltz

Indian Cove

Austin, Texas
September 9, 2011