America those leaders will do anything to steal your vote.
Even if it means you stop speaking to your neighbour
Even if it means you accuse a stranger of being Hitler
Even if it means pretending you voted
Over an issue that blindsides the passing of legislation
That crushes individual spirits who work every day for their dream.
America blood stains and teardrops are smeared all over your pay cheques.
Patriotism is never complaining about what they’ve done to you.
I used to think America cared about the constitution—
Freedom of this, people have the power to mobilise, over that
Reading those principles for the first time felt like witnessing a shooting star.
-
Ever since a boy, I dreamt of riding a greyhound bus through Americana
Beyond the Badlands towards the west’s Grand Canyon.
The bright lights of desert city shone in my dreams as a boy high on sugar
I craved roadside diners with stools and booths and ketchup bottles
Places where truckers covered in grease and country girls dressed in tight denim
Devoured double cheeseburgers, fries, coca cola
As a jukebox played Springsteen, Coltrane, Holly or Chuck—didn’t matter
They were all America and America was them.
-
America, what have you done to independent thinkers?
Why are all your people prescribed, maddened by isolation?
You have mobs—your rebels think their cause is blind rage, it’s vulgar.
Where is your adulation for those who believed that one day
They would become the American dream?
-
Power has packaged civil liberties into threats about democracy
You are told time and again the other side is no longer your friend.
Karl Marx is making a comeback, corporations own your native lands.
I used to invite the literature and yellow cabs and cowboy boots of America
Into my dreams.
America is a nightmare of contradictions
Torn and frayed like the limbs of soldiers you sent out to fight winless wars
Designed to feed the machine.
-
America, when did your identity become virtue signalling politics?
When did your bravery become senseless cries heard from maddened minds
Who believed what the mainstream media told them.
You used to place a hand on heart and recite national anthem
You used to believe anything was possible if you dedicated yourself to a goal.
America where have you hidden your God?
You burn like a starry dynamo that denounces your own name in public spaces.
-
America the left or right will not save you, only consume you like a cheesburger.
Taxes and time and law and health and blood and guts and pride and hope
Gone like a pop song you once played on national radio.
The robot boss
The corn syrup tub
The ultra-processed meat they banned in Europe
Politics they promote to keep you sick.
-
Wake up and scream you’ve had enough of this kind of America
Protest as one not other, take the streets you burn down.
And remind those who control your free will and civil liberties
America could give a shit what name you call yourself
Or where you come from or how you live
As long as it done so with a spirit to succeed
In America.
-
Do you still remember
Baldwin and Kerouac and Fante and Billie Jean?
Good. Just remember what it felt like to exist in a community
Of people who want the same skyscraper opportunities
They saw in the movies you watched.
I have read the great immigrant stories that turned paupers into kings and queens
Have you?
-
Kamala or Donald or whoever else’s hand fits the glove
It doesn’t matter. These people will say or do or tell or perform
Just to make America believe it was never America in the first place.
But another country
One controlled by taxes and law and the few who have been corrupted
Enough by a machine
No one asked be built in the first place.
I hear echoes of Ginsburg in this poem. Thinking back to his time and mine, how ironic how little has changed.
Shades of Ginsberg, certainly. There were some nice 'howl' lines. As a European I hope that America's trajectory is a warning to us lot ... but those protesting are slowly being hammered hard back into the dust of the voiceless.