You’re A Bad Boy

You’re a bad boy. You stay up well after midnight
to plan society’s future.

It’s easy enough. Just decide
what will terrify them

into their next inevitable dumb move;
then go make that happen.

Will they be more motivated by the acts of
their neighbors, or by the acts

of what they call “God?”
Or a stew of both — a storm drawn forth

from capitalism, a war clause invoked
over failing, stolen aquifers? Anything might do it.

It’s that close. How to make it happen
is the question that keeps you up.

You could just go out into the dark,
lie back in a dry field and pray for rain, or fire.

You could process and process the news
seeking the keys to the machinery

that makes such things happen, find tiny clues
or fake clues to their whereabouts, decide

for or against their veracity, exhaust yourself
in conspiracy, then die convinced in thick fog.

All you have to do, you realize, is go back to sleep.
Inaction is as powerful an agenda as anything else.

It might be dawn somewhere in the world
but you’re an American and all you have to do

to make the future happen is stay the night’s course
and go back to sleep. All you have to do

to wreck shit is be American.
Go do that, you bad boy. Make that happen.