Hey kid!
Need a gun for Christmas?
How 'bout a land mine, grenade launcher
or poison dart?
Wanna go to the virtual reality world
and beat down homeless people?
Hey kid!
We have loaded dice,
hemlock rice,
'n' 28 flavors of body lice.
We have cartoons of a baby buggy
loaded with 30 lbs. of TNT
exploding in a crowded Baghdad street market,
and our laser swords will glow
through Silent Night,
O Holy Night.
Hey kid!
Come on down.
Visit Toys 'R' War,
get a head start on death.
Learn to kill
in your infant mind.
By your 18th birthday,
murder will be easy
as playing a computer game.
________________________________
Michael Revere is a writer, rock drummer, and laborer who lives in Helena, Montana. For more than 40 years he has conducted poetry readings and workshops in college and high school classrooms and at public venues throughout the U.S. He has published several collections of poetry in print and on CD and his poems have appeared in many periodicals, newspapers, and magazines around the world. "Toys 'R' War" was published in War, Madness, & Love, a collection he shared with Mark Gibbons.