Stars and stripes

--I was rather amused to find 'patrotic poems' under poems about life, as patriotism usually leads to the opposite: death--

Oh, say can you see,
through the day's morning light
(and the smog of pollution,
the smoke of a burning constitution)
Stars and stripes.
Stars, like the flashing of 50 (or is it 51)
explosions in the sky - each one a death.
Each one the snuffing of that greatest star of all: life.
Red and white stripes, like blood daubed over starved flesh. Yet Saturn's oceans could not purge the stain. Like the sunset, the red covers the whole earth in its ghastly light.

If you mix red and white do you get pink?
That's not what Bush would like to think?
Pink like the gays; pink like the flesh, before it's set ablaze.
And red and blue for democrats and republicans too.
Purple? Surely not! The colour of imperialism?

So much blood.

--I doubt you've read this far--