Terrorist
by Mark Wyatt
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.
