RACKETEERING
Racketeers growing fat
Profiteers growing old,
While soldiers fight and die
Their corpses growing cold.
Tasteless highwaymen
With a heart of solid lead,
Making profits by the tonne
While making good men dead.
Profiteers worship money
While undervaluing life,
Their killing fields are bloody
Death and despair are rife.
Nothing matters for them
Except for unholy greenbacks,
Corpses filling whole towns
Body bags in so many stacks.
Life and death are mere factors
In how these devils make their cash,
Selling death to many millions
Innocence is now under attack.
Jackals control death's industry
Getting a near orgasmic thrill,
Making profit from suffering
As their machines maim or kill.
Jeeps, tanks, jets, and destroyers
Bring joy to these murderous pests,
While in the bloody killing fields
Piles of corpses are lying at rest.
THE END
© Copyright 2022 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
About this poem
I remember the saddest day of my life, when I was nine or ten. When I learnt the most obscene thing I've ever heard. That private companies are allowed to make weapons of war for profit. Despite being unemotional as a rule, I cried out loud when I heard this. I still believe that if the UN passed a worldwide law that only governments could own factories making weapons of war, that war would virtually end. History is resplendent with examples of private companies giving millions of dollars worth of weapons to small nations, then grossly overcharging the big nations, to keep what should have been a short war going for years or even decades, so that they could grow fat on the profits of death!
Written on May 11, 2022
Submitted by philip0157 on June 04, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 49 sec read
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Quick analysis:
Scheme | XAXA BCBC BDED XFXF GXXX EHXH GXXX XXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 908 |
Words | 164 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 |
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"RACKETEERING" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 20 Sep. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/128598/racketeering>.
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