America I am tired
America it is late
I have come to you on
broken knees.
I have been phoning you
all night long
A poem is breaking
on my lips
I am ready to take off
my shoes.
America whose factories
are closing down
America who takes advice
from the wives of TV evangelists
America whose choir
sings the blues.
America of burroughs
and tenements
and curious gargoyles
spiralling to the ceiling which is the sky.
America prosaic in long ceremonial robes.
America who is the same neanderthal king
behind all the uniforms of the day.
America who throws snowballs in New England
and sweats in Nevada
America who wraps its arms around Paris
swooning from the Eiffel Tower
America hungry and naked
in Watts and Harlem
and Mechanicsburg Illinois.
Chassidic America, Black America
America of Confederate Arkansas
and dogpatch Tennessee.
America who is Shirley Temple in the clothes
of Heddy Lamarr
who is Sodom at Gomorrah,
America who is the colour of your skin.
America who stood by while my grandfather was
gassed
boxcar, boxcar, boxcar.
America who scalped half a nation,
sold used cars at the Mekong.
America who lost a war, lost a war
lost a war.
America who grew its hair long and shouted
obscenities
all the way to the city limits,
who studied Isaiah and the book of Leviticus
and wound up excommunicated in the living
room,
who followed Albert Schweitzer into the wasteland
and came back with Frantz Fanon
speechless.
America who gave up on Nirvana and moved
to the city and tyrannical baby Jesus
who finally surrendered to sentinels of dry
cleaners
and insurance salesmen
blindfolded, chanting mantras before firing
squads
of valedictorians.
America who became a vegetarian
after giving up on Mao and astrology,
and afternoon excursions to Grauman’s Chinese
fair.
America who left a habit of three hits a day
to study the ideology of growing old.
America who built 40 ft. crosses and took to
the desert
only to be crucified in jeans,
who found itself nervous on a guard tower
waving made-in-Hong Kong American flags.
America who left class to cop a feel
and ended up on death row.
America who has forsaken Proust and Rilke,
Yevtushenko and Thomas Mann.
Too busy whispering its arcane secrets
to know the difference between 100,000 political
prisoners
and the outlaw Josey Wales.
America who killed Willy Loman
Jack Kerouac and Black Martin Luther King
and put Wilhelm Reich and Ezra Pound
behind bars.
America who buried Shelley in New Jersey,
who in its mad rush to defend its deity
replaced Alfred Lord Tennyson
with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau,
before the tree of knowledge
was cut down.
America who moved to Connecticut and left the
nightmare behind.
America of baby carriages, baseball caps
and a toothless grin that stretches for miles.
America who demonstrates, demonstrates
demonstrates
then goes for coffee with its friends.
America who is the archaeology of our time
America whose place in history is carved in
cement.
America who has a love affair with madness
who is horny with the idea of enlightenment.
America who plays spin the bottle with presidents
who is in love with flags,
who invented the weekend and lost its mind.
America who argues over politics and marriage
and the exact syntax of love,
who tosses and turns all night long
deciding between pornography and romance.
America who mistakes fear for tolerance
and tolerance for love.
America who hides its boredom behind a white
picket fence
who somehow drags itself out of bed
to the breakfast table,
somehow to work
certain like a thousand unambiguous dictionaries.
America who gets tough with whores and pimps
then hides in the yellow pages
cries and begs, like a wounded animal
in the streets,
and complains of being too human in the courts.
America who gives head like a beauty queen
and dies slowly like an old whore
who drags grade schoolers
screaming, in suits and ties
memorizing dates,
howling all the way to the altar.
America who survived the deathcamps
to suffer aimlessly
in the philistine gutters of the kitchen.
America who dances like a drunken warlord
with pitchforks
on heaps of garbage
in the lazy purgatory afternoon,
hurling quarters into the slot machine
which is time, rocking itself
to a cold human tune,
armed with a pen flashlight and a den of theories
crawling back into the womb.
America whose mouth is the small wound of eternity
whose frugality is its excess,
whose simple version of the truth
is the jugular of all faith.
America who hangs like a crucifix from
the swollen heart of every commandment.
America whose gossip is the cavalry
of a thousand dreams.
America, who is screwing all the prostitutes?
Who is lusting in their hearts?
America, who is behind the news?
America who sold 4,000,000 pet rocks
America who makes an emotion out of new shoes
who ruins rainbows with pots of gold
and sells used panties to 12-year-old boys.
America of bronze shoes and brass hats
and paper thin hearts.
America who collects boxtops, boxtops
boxtops.
America who is the philatelic society gone
mad
whose guardian angel is greed.
America who hangs from this voice like a ventriloquist
America who calls this the American dream.
America you are laughing all the way to the
bank
You are dragging yourself out of the Hudson
river
You are smart with your hands in your pocket.
America you are jumping out of birthday cakes
You are growing old waiting for the love scene
You are Rome with a ten gallon hat.
America who makes me a whore at the five and
dime
who makes me a salesman when I take off my
clothes
Hold me with your tumbleweed heart
Hold me uniformed and naked
Embrace me with your sullen eyes.
America, make me your Imperial Wizard
Make me the dark magistrate of your soul
Make me the gracious master of your doom.
America, I am the straight-legged usherette
of history
I am the hunchback of serious art
I am the weak-kneed cannibal of war.
America I am on the platform kneeling on my
heart
I am lonely on the 49th parallel.
I am writing you from Cuba
I am sending postcards from Casablanca
I am almost in China
America it is a long way home.
America at the head of the table
Goliath of the third world.
America with a slingshot
America with a 10,000 mile scar.
America who makes house calls from aircraft
carriers
who arranges marriages from the 6th Fleet.
America who is a monkey grinder in the universe
everywhere there is spare change.
It is a good idea to bless your food.
It is a good idea to bomb babies when no one
is looking.
America who tucks itself in every night with
this strategy.
America before the match
America before the fall.
America at the peephole
America looking back like a bomber pilot.
It is five minutes to doomsday
It is amateur night in the universe
America, don’t mistake a goose for a missile.
Not one of your churches will save you
not one line of iambic pentameter
not one courageous review in the New York
Times.
I am paying my final respects
Franz Kafka is watching
Peekaboo America, America
peekaboo
America, I know you will understand.
America who kicks and kicks like an infant
child
spawns the daylight, stillborn,
still ambitious,
America who is the seed of all virtue
the curator of all pain.
America on the lengthy pilgrimage from the
heart to the throat
America on the long journey from here to there
America dragging its heart, like tin cans
behind its vows.
America who hangs from its own memory
like a drunken star.
Jeff Bien
Kempville ON
(From: America &
Other Poems)
1997 © graffito