False Flag
False Flag
By Jed Myers
The nobles and all
their hires and orderlies
can always
be moved to call
for a crackdown
Oh, this is old
and readily aimed
done unto Christians
Communists Jews
immigrants
offspring
of slaves
even among close
kin the method is
used
[didn’t my
brother and I
finger each other
before the scowling
emperor Mom]
The German parliament
Reichstag
burned
Communists blamed
[Berlin’s fire chief
found evidence
it was the Nazis
He wound up strangled]
and Hitler got Hindenberg
to suspend civil
rights
Oh, this is old
and so alive
on the streets tonight
And in fourth-century
Nicomedia
secret servants
set the palace ablaze
the Christians blamed
So old and alive
as the blinding fusion
of fire and mind
and so easily
digitalized
transmitted across
the sky
a good hundred
million viable
sparks of blame
A car’s torched
and the arson assigned
to the darkened faces
of the amassed
aggrieved
[or was it
a hooded pale servant
of some other cause]
false flag
it is called
It’s alive
and it works
too well
Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox, Ruminate, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle and edits poetry for Bracken.