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Terrorist

Editor's Note: Please view this poem on a PC to maintain its shape.

                                        Fanaticism fuels

                                   this shell of a man clad

                                in metalcasing, sealing in the

                              haunting screams of slum children.

                            Faith is a lighted candle now torching

                          a short fuse, and vengeance is explosive.

                         To get this far, he has infiltrated mundane

                        lives, so hell-bent on rosy happiness they’ve

                       been blind to this taut and wolverine stranger

                      prowling watchfully in their midst, waiting. He

                     has taken sincerely proffered hands of friendship

                     with an awkward, twisted grimace for appearances.

                     Like a bell ringing incessantly in his head is the

                     tortured soundtrack accompanying mutilated images

                     of Palestinian babies being hacked to death that

                      he uses as justification. As pure and innocent as

                       lambs are the meek being hounded from their homes,

                        stripped of everything they owned save their flesh

                         and blood, which they are then asked to watch die,

                          before their eyes. In Palestine, he has seen this

                           again and again, and he’s part of a vicious

                           cycle, he knows: repression, terror, torture

                            & then viler repression, infernal terror,

                             unimaginable torture pushing the world into

                              a downward spiral, sending it spiralling

                              down into hell, reasoning that it’ll take

                               large spoonfuls of searing, agonizingly

                               gut-wrenching terror before         they

                               even start listening after

                               all. With his hand on the

                               trigger, he’s ready, this

                               complete and utter nobody

                               from nowhere, visible to

                               everyone and positioned

                               anywhere, a man with no

                               face, whose flesh will

                               fly and fat will fry.

Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His pattern poetry has recently appeared in Borderless, Cosmic Daffodil, Exterminating Angel, Full Bleed, Greyhound Journal, Hyperbolic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Osmosis, Sontag Mag, Streetcake Magazine, Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, and Typo. Other work is forthcoming from Allium, Artemis Journal, Libre, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shift, and Tupelo Quarterly.

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