America 2020
The national leader
towering epitome of
crazed ambition,
pitiful ignorance
remarkable stupidity,
a hollowed-out spirit
directing a vast army of
the walking dead
with a cacophony of lies and
intentioned misdirections.
America 2020
vast homeland
marooned on a ruderless ship
bound for perdition,
blind to the truths
that lie about like
deserted corpses,
blind to its own endemic racism,
its xenophobia,
its homeless and dispossessed,
blind to its blood-soaked history
leaving the insidious remanants of holocausts
around the globe,
blind to its hatreds
its relentless and perpetual violence,
blind to the tattered fabric of its
own brutish past,
blind to the scorched and beleagured planet,
blind to the magnificent beauty of
its very homeland
filled with such wondrous diversity.
America 2020
land of the walking dead
fluent in endless praise
of their great country
that they proclaim with
supposed love and reverence,
yet perversity reigns
as poisons are injected with
haphazard indifference into
the sky and water and soil,
as the automobile is held sacred,
oil valued more that the future,
science held suspect
and the health and safety
of the next generations
discarded like an old and battered
pair of jeans.
America 2020
citizenry armed and dangerous
the gun a tool of vigilanty justice
beneath the shadow of the noose
where the spirits of all of those
black souls hung and mutilated
scream out at us as a reminder
of our collective decadence,
law and order the mantra
spoken with eloquence
on the trash heap of battered justice,
prisons filled with the poor and
people of color,
prison cheap labor abudant,
lives emptied of meaning
among the denizens of captivity.
America 2020
homeless everywhere,
children with hungry demeanor
plague the streets,
poor and the destitute
queueing up at foodbanks,
bivouaced on parkbenches,
convening makeshift alliances at
bus stations and subway platforms,
crumbs dispensed with fanfare
from lavish banquets where
deals are made
and wealth assured for those
with profit running through their bloodstream.
America 2020
nation of sleepwalkers
oblivious to the reality all around them
to the incessant beauty of the
human world,
to the cosmos,
to the striking wonders of the
natural world,
to all the needless suffering,
oblivious to the inherent precious and
transient nature of passing time.
America 2020
standing at the abyss
ready to make the plunge
into the swirling vortex of
its own cumulative past,
ready to consign reason
to the graveyard,
ready to dissolve into the chaos
of violence and needless destruction,
ready to surrender freedom to the
vagaries and madness of senseless authority,
ready to consign an extraordinary experiment
that was America into
the unforgiving graveyard and
the future to desolation and regret.