What can I say to you
with your ears so far away,
your face vaguely recalled
from a news photographer’s hazy negative
in which you are portrayed
as one who has strayed from his humanity,
one who assassinates saints
like an abortionist of the already-born,
you the Emperor of Evil
with harangues between teeth.

At every airport,
especially the one in Athens,
your conspicuous smile
is a deceptive facade
behind which are concealed
not only gold fillings
in your big mouth
but grenades and bombs
and whatever ordnance
broken down
into such minute parts,
O weasel man,
as can slip past the electronic eye.

When I board my plane
I know you are in front
and behind me simultaneously
like Proteus
with your many shapes and disguises.

The sky has no boundaries
and you from your palace in Tripoli
can handle the strings with deft hands,
you the so-called colonel
who salutes parades
simply to exasperate
the comfortably rich,
who want to stay that way,
and despoil the vacations
of those on fixed incomes
from meager pensions.
Upon them you fling the cold steel
of your ominous daggers
in gestures of justice.

There you go again
holding your gun
at the temple of an aging pilot
descending and climbing
from airfield to airfield,
a subject for the newsman’s cliches,
your threats no less than your demands
words on paper
carried in a diplomat’s pouch.
If you wish tobacco
your victims are generally generous.
And if you manhandle
some defiant lout
who challenges your idealism
because you have already convinced youself
the wretched have no choice
you expect to be stormed eventually
with the thunder of adulation.

Here in America, you say,
methods proliferate
to thrust hunger upon the famished,
to confiscate remedies
from those limping toward caves
and therefore various plots are afoot
blessed by Mr. and Mrs. Respectable
to seal your efforts
in an inconspicuous tomb
after slivering the flesh
of one of your typical orations
for a petty price
with some very common weaponry.