Here we are
Toy soldiers, Barbie dolls
Monopoly money flying off the shelves
As intentions remain disguised,
A rush hour to nowhere.
Suspicion hangs heavy in the air.
Fingerprints of greed upon the land,
Stain the walls and smear every surface,
Tearing our world apart
Entangling us in a labyrinth of lingering agony.
As financial empires crumble and fall,
We tumble towards a dismal crown.

Here we are
A shot heard around the world
Misdirection concocted with twists of propaganda
A sinister plot to keep us quiet
While economic doom looms large,
Forcing us to gasp for breath in its tort.
We are sliding into a sea of hell,
Crafted with a sinister dusk,
Leaving us trapped in uncertainty.
A bipartisan fakery,
A manufactured reprieve of endless war
Bacchanal Celebration of the uniparty,
To keep us all in the duality
Of a totalitarian doomsday cult of our own making,
With ties to the darkest corners,
Where shadows dance in the hue.
Why did George Orwell paint a future so dire
Of totalitarian control, a world on fire?
To blackmail us into believing
We are incapable of repelling it,
Pressuring us to fear, to tyranny.
Wall Street proclaimed, "Greed is good,"
A mantra repeated, understood,
Molding our minds, shaping our views,
Enforcing belief in capitalism's ruse.
Political speech, a vile roast of reality,
A nonsensical tale of deceit,
Yet, within its twisted words,
Makes us struggle to comprehend our reality.
Revelations of a conning government,
Manufactured divisions run deep,
As secrets too dark to keep.
In the chaos of our unraveling,
We grasp for a glimmer of light,
But find ourselves lost in the darkness
Of a world consumed by blight.
Do The Right Thing, a mirror held to our face,
Amid conflict beyond repair.
We consume the lies, a terrible plight,
Believing we're powerless, as they've said.
Free falling into despair
Believing we're powerless as the moments fly by.

Here we are
We've been conned and betrayed.
In the shadows of towering skyscrapers,
Where dreams were once fashioned from thin air,
A secret kleptocracy aims to divide and deceive,
Bleeding us dry, as we unquestioningly believe
In our American uniqueness
Until we start blaming each other
While everything gets worse,
A dysfunctional elite
Building lies around dysfunctions
Inducing us into believing
Our eroding circumstances are our own,
As they steal our lives, forsaking us to atone.
Fake news media informs us to be angry and tribalized,
Daytime television warns our morality is compromised,
Local news instills fear in our neighbors, near and far,
As we celebrate masked actors, forgetting who we are.
Reality Tell-a-Vision doesn't tell our reality,
Preferably, it shows life's hedonistic strife.
Zombie television tells us the public remains our enemy.
Social media floods with existential rife,
With nonsense conspiracy theories and memes abound,
Telling us we're hopeless in a world so unsound.
On a never-ending track,
An all-time high in the belief that we are helpless,
No matter the bubbles we encase,
Bombarded with existential crises in every space,
A surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and games,
Telling us there's no way out of society's flames,
As we buy cans of Liquid Death, in our despair,
And drink Death Coffee to fuel our inner plight,
In this rotten farce, we see no end in sight.
For our entire lives, we've been led astray,
In a world where our strength is fading away,
Divided against itself in a power play so grand,
As we believe we're powerless.
But in the end, we're left alone,
In a world where truth is overthrown.
As we've been brainwashed with silent screams,
We find ourselves constantly shaking down.
Things escalate wildly in a world gone awry
Where Dr. Strangelove teaches us to stop and comply.
In the collapsed towers, nobody stands,
Only masked actors with bloodied hands
As we hurtle towards an inevitable brawl.

Here we are
Investigating the mountain of lies,
We uncover the truth, rotten to the core,
As vicious beasts roam in our streets.
Smoke and mirrors promise miraculous destinies,
But abandoning us stranded, battered, and frail.
In this desperate state of dying slowly,
Words ring true, screaming at us to wake up.
Yet suspicion clouds every intention,
As we ponder the reasons why.
The fabric of society frays at the seams,
As revelations tear through the veil,
Exposing the rot within our midst.
Our lives are a tangled web of deceit.
O say, can you see?
We are drowning in the sea.
On this moon of deception and decay,
We grasp for a semblance of truth,
But find ourselves drowning in the sea.
O say, can you see?
Did we go to the moon?
Why are we drowning in the sea?
Our Statue of Liberty is sinking fast and deep.
O say, can you see?
I'm begging you; can you see?
In the wreckage of shattered dreams,
We find ourselves lost in the debris,
Victims of a grand illusion,
Where reality is uncomfortable to see.
Terrified, yes, but unafraid to tell,
The tale of our time, the ringing knell
Of corruption and deceit,
We rise, we rise; we must rise above
In the name of truth, justice, and love.
O say, can you see?
              Can you see?
              Can you see?

I’ve already done my ten-thousand hours
Under the light of the moon and the sun.
”Self-made” contains its own divine power
In the minds of the Americana.

My bootstraps, I’ve pulled
Until they tore off.
I admit, I’ve been fooled
In this Land of the Lost.

And still yet they shout, at Forefather’s behest:
“Give it your all! And then give me the rest!”

I walk alone
For the sake of everyone I love and know
For the blush of unspoiled fruit
So we can walk out into the sun
Freemen and not slaves
So we can get out from under the thumb
Of oppressors who seek to keep us down,
For the Americas
My Americans
For her siblings, allies of dear note to
Fair Lady Columbia
For all that share in the rays of the cosmos
My friends, nature is so beautiful
And once was so full, in this world
Of all the things gone extinct
It is less they do not control
Remember, you too are an animal

The dream revolt of desk jockeys
Of disc spinning, pipe hitting Americans;
A rich man's insurrection.
Not something I'll be part of;
Something I'll watch
As they step on our flag,
Something to stir real action.
Try it, I,  like the rest of us,
Will watch the skin drip from you
As tar does too, and feathers adorn.
You can call that macaroni
When you try to be oppressive
With the law or religion
Or worse yet, the dissolution
Of the two being different.
When they steal from you now,
It will be in the name of God.

Sometimes after Lisa and I do our early-morning 4 mile run (we treadmill in the basement fitness center if it’s under 43 degrees), I come back and lie on my bed, for just for a moment. This morning it was just as the sun broke over the horizon and a pink light crawled across my ceiling, highlighting every imperfection, like craters and mountains on some distant, barren planet. My Apple watch went chikle-inkle-lnkle. Ok, Time to start the day.

Later…

Leong got a new ‘Girls Life’ magazine, those always seem packed with the latest scientific info.
“Studies suggest that you and your deepest friends may share the same blood types!” Leong read aloud.
“I’m O-negative,” she announced, “What blood type are you?” She asked me.
“Red,” I revealed (I am, after all, pre-med).
“DElicious reddd,” Lisa updogged in a Bela Lugosi vampire voice.

“Americans are never serious,” Leong whinged, her voice rising and falling on the last syllables.
“That’s what makes us what we are today,” Lisa asserted, “a slowly, steadily, declining superpower.”
“We could join the military after Yale,” I suggested helpfully, “I bet they’d make us officers.”
“Oh sure, I heard the army’s making men out women these days,” Lisa agreed.
“Sounds messy,” I said, wincing.”

on ruby jacobs walk, a
small girl
asked us for money for ice cream.

she eyed our cones
                                yours, lemon
                                mine, strawberry
with a child’s hunger
glinting and opportunistic
as she held out her palm for coins.

i was not yet accustomed to the shapes and sizes,
to a dime being smaller than a nickel,
and in any case wanted to preserve them for souvenirs
so we shook our heads and walked away.

a year later, writing this poem,
i learned that ruby jacobs was a local restauranteur
who, as a boy,
illegally sold ice creams
for a nickel on the boardwalk.
                                                a nickel is the larger coin
                                                the size of a ten pence piece.
                                                i know that now.

the wide atlantic rose from a sloping manicured lawn
        star-spangled,
                                like everything here,
                                                           ­     the airborne flag
                                                            ­    above a wide pavilion
                                                        ­        a fanatic wedding cake topper
                                                          ­      against the blood-blue sky.

        i slipped
out of my shoes and let
the white sand burn my feet,
and jaggedly fill the spaces between my toes.

the atlantic held open its arms
though we weren’t, as we imagined,
                looking east
                looking home
but south to new jersey, across the bay.

the gnarled boardwalk was a
song of the twentieth century
        a roll-call of mass-market capitalism
        here in the city that didn’t invent the concept
        but certainly perfected it:
                                                hot dogs
                                        amusements
         ­                       ice creams (we’ve covered that)
                        fridge magnets
                baseball caps
        i bought an espresso cup with a picture of the president
and the caption:
                         ‘huuuuge!’
i stopped to take a photograph
of a space-age building from the fifties
which turned out to be
                                        a public toilet.

later
from the sunbaked d train,
brooklyn spread out beneath us
the houses garnished with flags,
then the city coughed us up on seventh avenue
and night fell five hours early.