day THREE HUNDRED and FIFTEEN

questions about islam

hustling through

the atlantic avenue terminal

with straphangers

who wouldn’t know the difference

between a sufi and a sunni

trains not running right again

a little weekend secret we keep over here

from the tourists in manhattan

and they are passing out brochures

every few paces

with titles like

questions about islam?

islam?

so you know it’s gone down again

this time a massacre in egypt

that our own dipshit president

is exploiting to build his wall

to keep the innocent out of america

three hundred and five mystics slaughtered

a thumbnail difference in your religion

that can get you killed

all we wonder now

is which cab driver will take a beating for it

for being a muslim when he probably isn’t even a muslim

which mosque will get hit with graffiti

the gentlemen passing out the brochures

to hurried brooklynites buried under holiday shopping bags

clutching starbucks troughs of coffee

look happy and docile

because they have to look that way

even when people brush them off

and tell them to go to hell

go back to your own country

good judeo-christian men and women

sitting on their thrones of judgement

too young to remember their centuries of holy war

heading home to apartments and houses

in the land of the free and the home of the brave

massacre-a-week-america

built on land settled by fanatics

so crazed with god

that they were kicked out of their own country

and had to sail across an ocean

to found this violent, bullshit one.               

--John Grochalski