America is the land
That without irony
Sells cigarettes
And nicotine gum
Side-by-side
At the checkout counter.

Corporate America,
Billboard America,
The CEO President
And the VP of Regional Sales Congress.

America,
Your power is a Coca-Cola enjoyed
Where clean water is a dirty dream,
Where the drone crater
Laughs at the school that was never built.

O night sweats! O nocturnal emissions!
America’s air-conditioned air
Refrigerates not the tumescent dream,
The room-temperature dream, the dream
Gone flat.

Here the orange-juice-wealth
Is a pulpy sludge that flows,
If at all, the wrong way.
Here illegals turn the orange groves
Into fields of orange ingots
Carted away
Into the great vaults
Of inequality.

America,
Be wary of what you export
And deport.
Lady Liberty’s torch,
Once doused,
Will not with ease re-ignite.
Denuded forests regrow, yes,
But the blasted mountaintop
Gives up its coal but once:

O burning paper!
O electric factory!
The news goes up in flames
Live-streamed ’round the world.
The machinery grinds on
According to its own logic,
Breathing heavy
Like the
Profitable crematoria at Auschwitz—
Exhalations
Seen from space.

America,
Know that were the 241-year-old orchestra to
Outlive
Its first phonophobic conductor,
There still may flow a music so rancid
It sickens the body politic
For as long as there is history
To record
That the great unfinished symphony
Was finished, or nearly finished,
Like a rough marble statue
Hammered
To the point that
No future Rodin, no former Donatello
Can its horrid features rectify.

Written on Tuesday, March 13, 2018