Poetry

Maria Teneva photo

By

Sarah Ito

The Intemperate Language Of Bull Tweet

Bull tweet speaks

In tongues,

The language of confusion

Draped in white sheets of alternate truth

Vague yet certain,

Like the target viewed

Through the steely sites

Of a wounded sniper

In the fog of war

Bull tweet flies

In the face of the probable,

On the wings of imaginary angels

And dies in the depths of despair

Over a cup of tea

Served with honey and blood

On a market day

In Aleppo

Bull tweet worships

At the altars of the Alt

Right and Left,

Quoting the Bible

Waving the Quran

Debating the Constitution,

And the recipe to bake

That perfect wall

Served with rice, beans, moral indignation

And razor wire

Bull tweet dresses

To kill,

Deceptive, seductive,

Over the top and under the radar

Defying gravity

Garbed in a robe, a gown, a starched collar,

A pinstriped suit,

The tattered uniforms of a hundred nations

Blonde, blue-eyed

Dark and handsome

Kissed by lips blotted

With deadly shades

Of fake news

And stopped presses

Bull tweet speaks

In tongues,

The language of confusion

Amplified

By those who choose silence

As their weapon of choice

Others, screaming proxies for their

Unseen gods

Justified by tilted idolatry

And directionless maps,

March backwards

Until the fractious horizon

Disappears…

Two hundred and eighty characters tumble over

The slippery edge

Where dead truths, like dead soldiers,

Molder in linear repose,

Forever lost in translation.

Sarah Ito

I am a novelist (GROWING UP GREENWICH, Outskirts Press), blogger and essayist, and occasional poet.