America 2020

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.