#welfarestate
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 urine-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.
Apr 26, 2018
Apr 26, 2018 at 9:13 AM UTC
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 sperm-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.
Apr 18, 2016
Apr 18, 2016 at 4:36 PM UTC