two hundred years ago
   or so
this title might have read
"America", etc.,

according to the myth
that then was strong
and still exotic
   and promising to aliens
with no experience

today, after Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears,
the Civil War, the Restoration, all the lynchings,
after Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua,
the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan,Lybia, Syria & cetera,
Ferguson, Baltimore, & cetera,
"America" has disappeared

it has, in fact, become quite evident
that to subsume the continent
   on the far side
       of the Atlantic or Pacific
   with this name
will do no more

   in truth, it rarely ever did

the mythic notion
   of a just and free society
was definitely buried at My Lai,
Panama City, on the desert plains
of Kurdistan, the Baghdad prisons,
    and Guantanamo
by racist violence & arrogance
   and pitiful ideas of white supremacy

   the usa today lies bare
   of the old promise of 'America'

street people, rampant fundamentalists,
drugs, and low employment rates,
in a society that longs
   despite its cherished myth
   of tough but honest competition
for holy war in order to rebuild with profit
   what it has destroyed with arms

that, to all evidence, cares not
a penny's worth for
   the unbuildable
   which never shows in the domestic census
or for the lives of others but their own brave boys
   preferably white
who have in recent years
      though with increasing discomfort
upon appointment by their country's presidents
achieved the dreary fame
   of bombing back into the stone age
distant lands that had
    just barely begun
to make it out from there

           * *