Carne Asustada

 ‘Frightened Meat’

You see it all around these days, from them wasted drive-thrus down to the unemployment bureaus

Mumbling their migrant Spanish shivering in the temp lines on dirty streets in the early morning smog

Wading through the fecal muck in the feedlots where they are jammed together like $XMAS shoppers

You hear it on talk radio and see it down to Wal*Mart, always suffused with this vaguely fearful odor

Hear it sizzling as it is forked and flipped on hot coals by overpaid and cellophaned talking heads

Then a whispered fear runs through the crowd, a pitiful moan that’s picked up all across the herd

They low and stamp their feet, tossing heads and twitching tails, edgy but unable to move at all

Yup, here’s your carne asustada smothered in fear-mongered propaganda with a side of singed hide

Hear it scuttling through the dark voids behind those paper-thin walls in that shoddy apartment

You can see their wide eyes follow it even as the microphone picks up their soothing fantasies

It’s also in that smell of fear that hangs in the air with all the poisoned dust thrown up by the herd

Naturally there are pitches for lots of stuff they claim can make it all seem a whole lot better

It echoes in the trite and postured catchphrases our canned Leaders use to signal a political intent

The kids pick up on it right away at a deep and non-verbal level and it stays with them for life

Steers call out, crowded single-file into filthy chutes, all leading without exits to the killing pit

Oppressed by the darkening uncertainty, they often snap savagely at their accidental brothers

The sound of disturbed creatures scuttling off underfoot in the fetid darkness does not reassure them

Driven harshly towards the noisy, smoke-belching slaughterhouse, a black, faceless terror fills them

Spiked reports of sinister plots directed at their families keep them too alert, for far too long

Promoting a prideful ignorance nurtures the irrelevant anxieties created to hold public reason at bay

Trapped beneath their crumbled house of credit cards they still faintly hear talk show voices above

Terrorist boogeymen haunt implanted thoughts which are remotely adjusted via clever pitchmen

Too tightly packed to look down, they can only guess at the awful liquid their hooves now slosh thru

Spiraled down with lowering living standards, they decay in the clogged sewer lines of poverty

They haven’t the energy to care where fastfood comes from or where their poisoned wastes flow

Standing cheek to butt together, they are driven through dark nights in loud and filthy trailers

They never know who they hate the most: their neighbors, those who control things or themselves

Their empty footfalls resound off littered streets where the grimy pall off their lifestyle never lifts

Surviving on machine-chunked and formed meat byproducts, they strut a programmed libertarianism

Their aged parents languish on open bedsores, over-medicated and ignored by illegale caregivers

Bovine death and dismemberment is minutely analyzed by efficiency experts and cost accountants

Elders are kicked aside for financial bleeding by EndOfLife care and BigFuneral corpro parasites

Even the greatest sales events and lavish sports extravaganzas cannot completely calm them now

Inexorably prodded closer to the sound of their co-workers packing up as they are offshored forever

Awakening me at 3AM, sweating from a bad dream, slowly twisting back to the real nightmare

Carne asustada still sensing that something must be wrong, even given all the pills and propaganda