Behold your public funds at work:
Trash-strewn gutters, loitering thugs;
Sidewalk dancers start to twerk
While tattooed clowns deal circus drugs.

Social workers check the pulse
In clouds of menace: sick-sweet smoke.
The cities brain and guts convulse:
Mad laughter for an absent joke.

Such Godless faces, Christless souls
Whose gazes show malign defeat
Evoke dysfunction. On it rolls:
A harsh, reptilian urban beat.

The ghosts of absent fathers fade
In methadone . . . the guttural yells
Infect the *****-reeking shade
Of demons bound in welfare hells.

America—reduced to this.
Fragmented, begging for repair.
A vicious and unkind abyss
Beyond all hope and all despair.

I want to flee such streets of noise
Where fate is read in scraps of trash
When sirens urge the circus boys
To pocket their illicit cash.

I sing of life at state expense
a state devoid of common sense
addicted to obesity
impolitic in body weight
yet headed for austerity
as other people’s money ends
plebeian class-revolt transcends
our bureaucratic history.

They stack the monthly welfare decks
complain the service second-rate
those sullen clients, thankless louts
pajama-clad with tattooed pouts
whose girlfriends swell while babies cry;
the fathers mumble, sagging high
and wait in lines. The women try
to fool the lunar period
conceptions waxing myriad
while teenage dads discover ***
and social workers cash the checks
the daily urban nightmare is
enough to scare a nation broke
in clouds of marijuana smoke:
the cashless global mystery.

The breeders born in tropic lands
are tempted till they take the bait
no baby-momma understands
what family means, what life demands
Your undertakers overstate
in order to remunerate
your Democratic history:
a bankrupt urban mystery
the not-so-Great Society.

The ghetto *****-donation ploy
makes babies but maintains the boy
to run around from mom to mom
slow-motion population bomb
as if to merely demonstrate
that social program funders wait
till number-crunchers aggravate
the urban teenage welfare state.