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
* *
