Evil wears this world

Like an archangel’s

Cloak stitched from patches

Where pain has bled into the air,

Into the soil.

It wears it like a rapist

Wears a condom,

Like a fascist wears his club.

On the ninth of October,

The Kurdish were betrayed

By their allies, the United States,

By Donald Trump and his acolytes,

His accomplices, the GOP

Still eagerly defending

The right of a venal brat

To hold the lives of millions

In his small uncaring hands

And toss them aside

For vanity and profit.

Once again the Kurds pay

For the capricious goodwill

Of western warfare.

Meanwhile, Erdogan

Another Saddam,

Another Assad,

Generously promises

Not to strand millions

On Europe’s callous shores

On condition of silence

To another genocide.

As a NATO force rapes

Rojava,

The world watches

And slowly turns away.

As Halloween draws near,

Westerners do well

To remember that

Monsters are but men and women

Callous, cruel,

Capricious and corrupt

At heart nothing but craven

Cowering from the outside to their inside.

They are the people

We ignore,

We elect,

We become,

Who refuse to see humanity

In the other

And thus erase it

In themselves.