The groan lifts
Like Yankees greeting Pickett
Eerily pronounced and wavering
Up along the cement tree trunks
Through the windows of capitalist Princesses
Buried in ears pasted on balloon-heads

Name branded, copy written
This fortress of our fathers impenetrable
Defends the deaf

From a basement:
Insomnious, drugged
Labouring to produce life
Pick locks for the suburban Alcatraz

From a basement:
To the floors of attics
Pink insulation blankets
Five bucks for food and smokes

From a basement:
To metropolises
To the offices of liars
To the steely castles of usury

From a basement:
Into feverish, vomiting disbelief
Spent and turned a pay cheque
Fingernails on cotton chalkboards

From a basement:
Three blocks to the water
To float still in the well of it
To ply life with exaggeration
To grin at whatever notion lives in the sky
And sink

Doses of dopamine
Some Neo-Solomon to secure the pillars of Rushmore
Fraud and his father parade rape
Flashing hundreds, doing lines in the can

Given to you straight
And still just the bravado of gutlessness
Packed into jars and pickled extinct
Some lame old thing called liberty

Poised a wreck
Teetering
Acrobats without middle ears
Dogs, all hungry, beg the winds up
Bones shown through wounds menu their lust
Blood for ketchup, food for oil

I’ll trade you my banana for your chocolate pudding
Because I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this

This, a hammer to beat the foil of despair
Vengeance pounded and wrought from wreckage
Jackboots to step the globe and in quicksand wear

Free men all in pretense
Babes of ocher hewn streets
Abandoned and known only in Hollywood
As the location of America

Asleep in our cars
Educated Styrofoam
Footnotes of the sophomore jinx
Several of Ten Commandments met

Children turned plastic foot soldiers
Parading May Day tiger’s teeth
The world sees brutality two ways
As horrible
As horribly accomplished

An ocean over, night slips day
Melting weeks drip months
Smothering cries, the frustrations of stones
All pragmatists by right

On the streets, the corners, people sleep
Figurines and chipped heirlooms
Coolly regarded
Distant, animalistic, removed from civilization

What truth for the lie not to become
Biblical dust swarms the surrendered
Laid out for the rains to bury
A foreign reporter anguishes them
Snaps a roll of film

A factory shadow
Rusted roofs, weed gardens of molding recliners
Five and dime evangelists stalk the isles of Walmart
Jeffersonian romantics gazing the velvet vistas of Guthrie’s sing-song
The socialist run out of his skeleton
Picked clean by the slithering Roy Cohen slugs of the American forest
This land is the automaton’s land

God is great some say
A percentage at least
Where they are to be found is a profound mystery
God’s work remains painfully his alone

A hammer
A swarm of bees
The dripping sun
Wrath and sand swept agonies
Vengeance drives taxis
From oasis to oasis
From town to town
Between the legs of giants

Into the southern swamp go the pasty white boys of Iowa
The pocked skinned boys of Missouri
The slick ruffians of California and New York
Chewing gum, spitting insults
Flabbergasted and sleep depraved
There, but not

Dancers
Out of step and time
Meeting clumsily for brief touches
Breaths of moments, tickled bloodless
Acknowledging, trampling feet, recovering

The air carries their music through the streets
To Mosques and hospitals
To sleeping houses where kids dream on the rooftops
Of burnt airplanes

In a trance
Perfect hair and perfect lips sell the world
Oceans of cola
Forests of fantasy
Minivans gleaming atop Mount Mutual Fund

Writers nervously check over their shoulders
Entombed brick by brick by heavy handed salesmen
Voices lost in a cacophony of finger nails on rock keys
Scratching out eternity

Oh Lord, in thy eternal kingdom – grovel
Burnt to faithless ashes my neighbors depart
I am left here witness to their corpses
A last vessel of those abandoned truths
More ancient than even you