God Told Me To
Let me manifest my destiny in your lives.
god told me to follow him west,
& in doing so
to take your fertile lands and rape your savage wives.
SAVAGES:
you need me to save you
with my Guns, Germs, and Steel,
face under boot heel
so I can reveal to you my dominance
& manifest my destiny in you.
I want your land and you need my faith.
& if you don’t want it,
I will give it to you
without consent
in the backwoods
where no one will hear the screams
of your ancestral past.
I will forcibly impose the body of my religion
onto the soul of your culture,
& leave my bastard child
in the form of alcoholism
for you to drown in.
& when my attempts at turning you to a noble savage fail,
I will blame it on your lack of intelligence
& drunkard ways.
UNINTELLIGIBLE SAVAGES:
what don’t you get about our decree
from god the all loving
to take your land & kill your people
in order to give the gift of understanding.
why don’t you get that we hold the commandments so dear,
& because you worship another-- We Shall Kill.
& Still.
you just don’t get why
we say: Thou Shall Not Lay With Another Man,
yet our holy men lay with your boys
and impress upon them
the self hatred
that will pervade future generations
With Every Stroke of Their Hips.
& the lips
of your children & children’s children
will never tangle with the tongue of your people.
their roots will never grow passed their shoulders
to ground them as young warriors.
we will cut their hair, their confidence, their cultural ties.
we will cut the umbilical cord that links them
with Mother Earth
& teach them to exploit her as we have exploited you.
& when assimilation fails
we’ll round you up
& leave you on the reservations to rot.
march you miles from your sacred homes,
to land that is foreign and bare to the bones.
& after decades of isolation on that forsaken land--
you will be forgotten.
& the only reminants of you will remain in
caricaturized mascots and scantily clad costumes.
your burial sites will be exhumed and suburbs built upon them.
your relics put in museums
& your language reduced to “Hao”
& that’s How I will manifest my destiny in you.
& its true that its been 200 years & I’m still trying,
your unburied ancestors are still crying,
and the history books are still lying for me.
But I’ve reached an uphill.
The Movement’s too strong,
& I’ll never admit I was wrong.
so the battle is stagnant
& the only way I can manifest my destiny in you
is to keep you silenced,
& the steady beat of your resistance
is getting harder to quell.