America,
you birthed me in a room of Navy nurses,
Camp Lejeune Hospital, NC 1976.
Before my first steps,
my bathwater flowed sanguine
from reservoirs poisoned with jet fuel,
a baptism with military grade degreasers.
Your war lording generals all knew
that carcinogens flowed in every mothers milk
who lived on that base.
America,
now my children do lockdown drills
between snacktime and reading,
but always after recess.
-
America,
Your Angel-baiting children clasp hands.
They pray the man who just stormed their school
doesn’t shoot them
but he does.
America at the tail end of being sick
there is a creeping fear that you are poisoned.
I’m not asking to look through your pockets
or even to x-ray some senators shoes.
His private jet sings smoke lines
across this land tis of thee.
America your satellites have become lice
and your computers are angry.
-
Every day I wake my children up at 6am
I ask them how they slept.
My grandfather bombed Japan for you.
My father crawled through Vietnam for you.
My Grandmother was one of your first female Marine Officers.
My Brother sailed on your SS Cole.
Then your Gettysburg folded
into the hallways of our classrooms.
Your Antietam stained our silenced playgrounds.
After Sandy Hook, I will instruct my children
never to fight for you
not until the war memorial employees
crack the teeth of the dogs of war.
-
Okay America I poisoned myself.
Your grassy liquor smells like talcum powder.
Your history is what I love more than you.
I will snatch that bride of yours
and we’ll have our honeymoon.
I will have her tell me all about George Washington,
Malcolm X and The Moon.
She will love me more than you and I her.
America Slavery is your cancer
and Sandy Hook is your dementia.
I don’t like my job and after too much whiskey
I break things and look stupid
but I wake up the next day and try not to,
unlike you.
-
America I wake my children up at 6am.
I comb my fingers through their hair
The smell of some shampoo that was on sale fills my nose.
I kiss them knowing I won’t see them again until that night.
America when I bring them to Chuck E. Cheese they stamp my hand
to show the exact number of kids I bring in.
We eat pizza play arcade games.
The corporate boardrooms tremble.
Lawyers scared I will abandon my children
to the paws of Chuck E. Cheese
I can’t leave without showing them my stamped hand
under a purple glowing light.
--A new Statue of Liberty.
Corporate America is scared of me as a father.
Only as scared as a buyer of pizza slices.
They welcome my purchase of an AR-15.
-
Neil Armstrong was not an AR-15.
-
America there is a pus in your sores
a red-ish, white-ish, blue-ish pus.
It urges its listeners to call each of those Newtown parents
all with dead children and they taunt and mock them.
“Have you no shame?”
I sing to those lost children.
They are now windswept ghosts that hold up cardboard signs on your
infinite streets of cowardice driving to your oceans of oil slicked preservation.
-
Abraham Lincoln crawls the sidewalks of your New York City
looking for tiny shards of dropped diamonds.
As you bloviate about your constitution molesting it with conspiracy theories
you pass him by not seeing the cracks in his magnifying glass
or his knee pads made of McDonalds wrappers and cardboard.
-
In your Providence I traded every part of me I could cut out for amethyst.
I cut it out and now “Art” is only “interesting“ to me.
I’m stuck in my own chord progressions.
There is a flatted seventh sticking me like a splinter in my long walks home.
26 shot dead, one for each fret on my guitar.
I play Amazing Grace when I’m drunk and the last note is on that fret.
It’s ok.
I worked in your health stores
stacked your boxes of bran and jars of VitaLife.
You would put your plants into gelatin capsules
then fly away with wine and private jets.
-
I thought I was doing great work selling your goods to a man.
He spent half a years wages on your magic cancer fighting herbs.
His children came in the store still dressed from the funeral.
bought our sodas.
I thought I was doing God's work in America.
I was just twitching along with your epileptic madness
and your bipolar sands that mixed with my blood.
-
Have you ever popped open a soda for a boy who just lost his father?
He says “Thank you,” but doesn’t make eye contact.
He bends down and picks up the flipping cap,
places it in his pocket, walks away.
I robbed a dying man of 6 months of wages.
I proudly handed it to you for 5.15 an hour.
If ever there’s a tumor in me
let it pulse larger when the clock reads 5:15.
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I lived in your North Carolina, your Kinston,
your Wilmington and Greenville.
I saw a man in a wheelchair wobble
his way to a jukebox in a McDonalds.
He put in a quarter, swollen knuckle and tired eyes seeking
the right song to enter.
It played and he started weeping to himself.
I used to write songs on my guitar.
Now I only think of strangers full of stories I’m too scared to hear.
I lived in your Boston and Brookline,
Woonsocket and Pawtucket.
You have a way of freezing cigarette butts to the sidewalk in February
and half shoveling your sidewalks
so ice catches the wheels of pushed baby strollers.
I saw a mother running to make the bus stop.
A red blanket over her baby’s face as her yells blended with
the accelerating motor of the bus.
They always miss the bus.
It’s OK lets hope they have wifi.
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America the chasm,
He shot them one by one in Newtown, the poor children of Sandy Hook,
and we did nothing between laundry loads and dinner dishes.
The nightly news mumbled to itself like the bum
who only rides the bus because it’s cold outside.
America the chasm
We’ve used up our last good Abraham Lincoln.
We shot him too and then the actors took over.