THE STEALTH POET
Enemy.
You will pass by,
hardly noting the well-kept house,
one of a row, on the re-gentrified block
of the old ethnic neighborhood.
The little boy, the stealth poet, will smile,
scanning his halo of green monitors;
fingers busy on the keyboard
of his control console,
clicking out a percussive rhythm
of command.
In his bunker, deep underground, airlock sealed
safe at last
he whispers: “You don’t even know my real name.”
His perimeter is secured.
In depth.
No simple tripwires, crude deadfalls,
inelegant stakes, messy antipersonnel mines.
The name of the game
is not Green Beret.
The soft technologies of the invisible boy
were developed in the think tank—
call it Camp Concentration—
of his top secret childhood.
He has toys
Star Wars Generals would pay billions
just to dream about.
Mirage generators.
Flexible skin-tight virtual reality body armor.
Emotion detectors
sensitive to radiation
in both the infrarage and the ultraviolent.
Viral anecdotal vectors
designed to infect an enemy narrative
and genetically alter its storyline,
thus bringing it to a desired end.
And X-ray eye-glasses
just like in the old comic books.
The New Age composite
of his Stealth Persona:
Code name—Best Friend—
goes undected by any radar
hostile or friendly.
The little boy believes in total security,
total defense.
In his own private Ministry of Love,
in closed, windowless, anonymous rooms,
he tests propositions of affection
with misdirection,
running rats, infected with his culture, through his mazes.
Like Goebbels, he wants to be a novelist;
and perhaps is destined for greater fictions.
His missiles stand ready in their silos.
Decoys and chaff fully deployed
to dazzle the satellites.
Self-programmable tactical software
whispers bedtime stories into the sleepy circuits
of multible warheads
targeting and retargeting
the shifting ground-zero of posterity.
