America

America. America is an ill-fated apartment
In the downtown slums,
New by years but old if you smell the smells
Of its worn, peeling, white-washed walls and
The black mold beginning to grow in the corner.

America is a long highway
Filled with cracks and potholes
And tar-brushed
Streaks of an over-worn tarmac.

America is a semi-truck rattling its bones
Down your not-so-small-anymore neighborhood street,
Calling out for the children of a younger generation
To come and play with its oil-streaked grill.

America is a fat man walking a fat dog
On a fat street filled with fat burger joints
And a cloggety-cloggety we run.

America is a stained plush carpet from the 1960’s.
Its liberal leanings crying out for peace and justice and such
But the cat’s just shat on it and
No one is willing to clean it up.

America is an overcrowded high school
Filled with over stimulated kids
Wording overplayed songs from the
Overly monotonous radio stations.

America is a cancer ward bursting at the seams
And no one knows why.

America in all its fame and glory…is not.

It has a taste of wine gone sour,
Muddled heathen breath of non-believers,
Personal gods on their hum-drum war paths
Cruising for that one good hit
That’ll give them stories 45 cocktail parties later.

America is a home like the home next to it,
Surrounded by pesticidal
Fields of production glory,
Labeled safe for human consumption
And the puppeteers steer clear.

America is a hope and dream gone contradiction
And a lie gone sour.
Please stand for the pledge of allegiance…

And I sit.

America is that bag lady on the street corner
Being beaten by a gang of teenage boys—
A movie in the making and
Four-star entertainment for the masses.

America is the bling without the substance,
The gleam without the eye,
The cream without the crop—
A window dressing to sustain its citizens
Through a long, drawn-out winter of know-nothing
Do-dads and banana splits.

America is a tattered flag flying
In the dusty shadows
Of a yard-stick highway.

America is a father without a son.
A patriarchal licenser of ‘Do this’ but ‘Don’t do that’.
Liberals expound their theories and say,
‘Let’s discuss’.

America, in its finality, is veneer
Without sincere or dear
And we are no where near
What we supposedly intended to achieve.

America is a history book gone fanatical.
The deathly bony fingers of
Columbus reaching up
To state that he was a great adventurer
And the discoverer of a new land—
New like water, wind, or air—
And the heads begin to bobble.

America is a series of weekends and 8-5’s
Of commemorative holidays for dead bodies we use
To keep the fiction rolling.

America is entertainment in war or peace—
Although the latter seems to have gone on leave.
It is a White House filled with white people
And white walls that, although they are prim and proper,
Are reminiscent of the ones I mentioned earlier.
On a bad politico day, which is often,
One can smell the reek
Of whitey politicians running circles in their hamster wheels
From damn-near half the world away.

America is tiring, exhausting, trying.
For, for this many people to
Believe in this place
Is an act of will beyond comprehension—
And we spin and spin away.

America was my home—a fiction of white picket fences
And wide open spaces (which closed minds helped constrict).
But, my childhood has ended,
The fiction must stop sometime.
And so I walk—
As far from this patriarchal poodle as my broken bones can bear.