World War America

Across woeful shaded lands in Kentucky,

Where the wind whistles with the whisper of wails,

There are parades of serving soldiers,

In neatly composed company columns,

Buried beneath Bermuda grass,

And yellowing tainted crosses,

For Yank sons and daughters,

On marching orders from molesting monsters and marauders.

The young are newly freed but still imprisoned,

In the traumatic trenches of their teenage terrors,

At the hands always grabbing them,

In schools, churches, and foster homes,

Learning to never trust,

In God, in law, in hope;

A generation of great regression grieving its dead nation.

The world is round but unbalanced,

Listing to the East,

The fault of great men of great ineptitude,

Dreaming of deranged dystopias of disastrous despotism,

Smothering the world in nightmares,

As though they truly trust their own jingo theology,

Like all naïve children do;

Throughout tumultuous tantrums.

Pray for the wee people not unlucky enough to be born in Nebraska,

But still must suffer at the hands,

Of demagogue Democrats and rapturous Republicans,

Playing games in the name of deciding the shade of empire;

Blood red or charred black,

All in the name of democracy and other Yank delusions.

Listen, listen, listen.

For fucking once listen to the language of screams we all speak fluently,

From Iran and Palestine,

From Ukraine and Greenland,

From Canada and Cuba,

And all the fronts that have affronted the inexcusable impotence of a corpse in waiting,

To rot and stain all over the world,

Leaving a smear of shit across the vast expanse of futures that will scar our children.

America,

Oh America,

America;

What a wasteland of what could have been!

No more united than you are standing,

Standing in a world gone in mere months from bittersweet stability to desertion and repression,

All in the name of nothing,

A commodity of surplus desperately flogged;

Nothing is the wares of the salesman,

Hustling and haunting the potential promised,

Leaving nothing now but a wait to be as old and decrepit,

Siphoning the future from the young and ready souls,

Yearning to live at last,

Unlike the corpses that gave them nothing of substance,

Not even their births!

And when our children,

Should we be so lucky as not to need to absolve them of our sins,

If they should return from the remnants of our world,

Laden down with boulders of textbooks they must roll,

And show the records flatter the Yanks,

Kindly, kindly, kindly,

Be patient as you mar them with the truth,

That the world changed for less than whims, wants, and warrants,

But the mere chance of whom a country can be,

As in denial then as now as forever she’ll be.

#HI