Drone pilots in training
Citizen Taxpayer
By Christopher Bernard
Every April he paid his taxes
(by mail, years ago—today, by the ’net –
he was law-abiding, innocent,
responsible, dutiful, no slacker, not lax, is
our upstanding taxpayer)—
and a penny went
into the hand of a homeland spy
who collected his emails,
tapped his phone,
followed his clicks on the worldwide web,
and saved them forever on servers in a mountain
in the gut of the Rockies, to make him (he said)
safer from the enemies of the United States,
“even if they’re me” (faunlike, nerdlike, he grinned).
The taxpayer, uneasy, returned his grin.
He didn’t mind, no, he got it, the need
in a warlike time
for deeds like these:
security required less liberty.
He had nothing to hide—
oh no, not he!
He wasn’t guilty,
though he felt mildly terrified.
Then he thought, “But that’s what
they want us to be!
The terrorists, that is.
They want us to be horrified, scarified, terrified!”
And he felt properly edified, dutified, mollified.
A penny went
to a caterer in Livermore,
and another to a weapons maker’s part-time chauffeur,
a penny to a Homeland Security clerk,
another to a therapist of a faceless veteran
(his face had been blown off on a road near Najaf),
a penny sequestered
the winter before.
And the taxpayer nodded
shrugged, grunted, and sighed.
He grumbled, “There’s a war on,
it’s not played like canasta.
They want to kill us,
so let’s first kill them.
What would you do, huh?”
A penny went
into the pocket of a drone jockey
who showed his mojo in the snowy state
better than at the local bar,
where he was known to play none too shabby or shoddy darts,
by crashing wedding parties in the Yemen hills
8,000 miles away into a thousand body parts.
A penny went
to the pension of an enhanced interrogator
who, under W., tortured Khalid,
and persons of interest in Waziristan and Kut,
and lives, under Obama,
anonymous, retired,
on the farthest flung of the Florida Keys.
A penny went
to the SEAL who killed bin Laden,
a penny to his boss, his ace buddy, his driver,
to the helicopter pilot who dropped him at Abbottabad’s savage gate,
a penny to a special op at Lahore,
a turned jihadist in Somalia,
a janitor at a black site in Iraq.
A penny went
to a recruiter in Davenport,
Tracy, Laramie, Charlotte,
Peoria, Duluth,
Boise, Stockton, Detroit,
to collect young men and women
“to teach them to kill for me.
Because I pay them.
I pay them all.
I am their paymaster, their leader, their boss.
They do what I pay them to do.
I am Taxpayer.
And what I pay them to do is to kill.”
And he bravely clicked Send My Tax, next April.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins (www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins) and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).