This Beast Is Beat

When will I get to Bethlehem?
Feels like I’ve been limping along
In that direction all my life

Since birth in a fallout shelter
Before the Cuban October.
I’m so tired. My back’s killing me.

Surely, by now I am closer?
My mother joked about Hitler
At a safe distance of decades,

How he was already heading
At least to Armageddon when
She was a girl. He came damned close,

And in some sense, we’re all refuse
And refugees still on the run
From that global cataclysm.

It was cold, when I was a child.
It’s too hot, now I’m a father.
But you can’t convince me it’s not

Just wave after wave of the same
Disaster, singular slaughter.
Oh, maybe you could. I don’t know.

I can’t stand this road anymore.
Abandon me by the wayside.
Bethlehem’s just too far to go.