In America

Originally written late 1996, early 1997.

In America there are drive through liquor stores
and cream corn wrestling pit strip joints
I am a child of the modern vacuum
and I am eager to be American
so I listen to television news
describing huge American pistol
throwing lead into a 14 year old

his ten year old companion screaming –

we didn’t know anyone lived here
we were getting wood for a fort

his ten year old companion screaming –

I don’t want to die

into 911

The dispatcher telling him –

Sweetie, you won’t

and him replying –

I might

and the whole time
the 76 year old killer saying

I gotta right they were stealing
they were on my property

In America there are Elvis churches
and spy shops full of surreptitious cigarettes
I am hearing our property come to life
I am hearing the country die

They say

that the Electric chair in America doesn’t work too well
They say the mask blew up into flame and
solid citizens got to see the head of Pedro Medina burn
I bet someone somewhere said it served him right
and someone else started a drive to switch from Old Sparky to
more humane and less confrontational lethal injection
so much easier on the witnesses
in America

In America there are head shops
peddling pseudo-Rastafarian hokum
and flea markets of Congressional loyalty
and it’s better to have the innocent die
or better that we become beasts to the beastly
than to let ourselves be fooled
by the modern ghosts of evil

(you can see evil in their eyes
but I’m confused: is it supposed to be all grey in there?
or should it look like Miami Beach
full of fun and pastel?
or does it look like the Everglades
full of gators and rare birds?
or does it look like me looking out?)

In America there are bridges
that flake until they fall
and rhyming monsters beneath them
waiting to invade the nurseries

I am a child of the modern vacuum
eager to become American

Ponce de Leon came ashore in Florida
hundreds of years ago
looking for
a Fountain of Youth
but what he really wanted was

Hooters
manatee blood
bison hide
passenger pigeon extinction
bales of weed wasted on the shore
drunken gropings resolving into violence
rootless numbers adrift on crazed ozone wind
immigrant massacres in the dark

flames leaping from the head of Pedro Medina
old man gunfiring into childhood forts
cream corn wrestling pit strip joints
drive through liquor stores
and a horizon as flat as a mouth

The center was empty
when Ponce got there

the Fountain of Youth was a booby prize

and today the center is still empty
but the vacuum is filling rapidly
with mystery boxes
full of cheap ripoffs of

Voudoun
Santeria
Wicca
Krishna Consciousness
Holy Rolling
Lutheran
Catholic
Buddhism

all swarming in ecumenical floods
around our true faith

Evangelical Consumerism

all molded by Television
into a spectacle of death
through satiation

I am a child of the vacuum
I am an eager American
In the absence of anything solid
I will believe whatever you tell me