If you take a stethoscope to a patch of dirt in a trailer park hidden somewhere in South Carolina, you will hear the arguments of a young couple, and the muffled sobs of a young boy as he cries himself to sleep in his pillow
In Maine there is a second story apartment where a mother who struggles to pay the rent, still finds the extra dollars to cover the cracks on the walls with paintings and photography to teach her daughter how rugged beauty can be
They teach you in Oklahoma that if you cover yourself in dirt and calluses, the gunpowder under your fingernails will taste like determination
Texas is the sole beneficiary to the piece of a 19 year olds heart that he himself carved out of his chest to wrap in a green reflective belt and give to a woman he thought he'd never find. Only to think he may never see her again.
Couple airplane windows with loneliness and you will be taught that country sides become galaxies after sunset, each star screaming to implode with the energy of rebellious eyeliner and Invader Zim sweatshirts
In Las Vegas there is 22 year old who belongs to her own army, her thighs and wrists covered in permanent war paint to show the battles she has fought in
Somewhere in America there is a homeless man who travels from town to town asking for nickels to feed the demon in his liver, yet still finds the time to tell teenagers with sunken heads and knives in their hearts during thunderstorms that everything will be okay
In the abandoned underground rap scenes of Detroit, the chipped paint on the walls still hold the words of a drug using man with grace tattooed on his neck, who since has long recovered to turn around and inspire the youth to use their words as amplified band-aids
This is my America
She is broken and battered
She writes in the back a green oxidized copper book the words that she hopes no will ever see
No one takes the time to look for the emotional damage behind the crack in a bell that's supposed to stand for liberty, but screams to the mothers of teenagers that it needs to see a therapist
Doctors and Psychologists funded by cigar smoking politicians can take scalpels to each teenager who has committed suicide, only to find nothing because the feeling of being an outcast cannot be found in the left upper quadrant of the abdomen, it's hidden in the part of the brain that is permanently bruised by the kids whose parents never taught them that it's okay if someone else can't choose to like the opposite ***
Those politicians won't listen to the kid sobbing into his pillow
Their walls aren't cracked and their kids don't die in deserts
They don't define love by green reflection, but by green paper
The concept of war paint is dressed in negative ad campaigns
I have yet to meet a suit and tie who will try to put a man with a ***** beard and a winter Carrhartt in an ****** apartment
They do ******* because they can afford to get away with it, not to hide the pains that they want to forget
This is my America
She shakes her fist at foreign passerby cruise ships while eagles perch on her shoulders with screeches of liberty
She is broken
She is ignored
On her island alone during thunderstorms you can see her crying
There is no drunken optimistic homeless man to tell her that she too will be okay
The claps of thunder radiating from her island are those of her sobs
She has no pillow to muffle her loneliness
I will ask her to read me what’s in the back of her oxidized copper book because I’ll be dammed if I have to watch another woman cry as these passerby’s do nothing about it
I will find that it reads but one word
"Help"