From egoistic soil
grew the world
swaddled as a boy
and as a girl,
the sexless sexed miasma
of a style
foretold by junk-sick dandies
and Prohibition guile.
A pornographic lullaby by night
our shared, forsaken heritage by day,
I saw the children grow from
the stories they were sold
in the markets in the ruins
where their playgrounds once had stood.
With this rich, distracted company
I grew,
and with them learned the anthems
and the history we knew
by the luster and the color
of the people on the screen,
who in timeless beauty
covered up
starvation’s keen.
Should some sad continent exist
beyond horizons blue and green,
past the corn fields and the fences and the news,
its name and its traditions
I may as well admit,
to the glamour of my mirrored youth
didn’t mean a shit.
What black and ruddy detritus
washed up along the beach,
our patriarchs and judges
taught us not to reach,
as they told us not to speak
to strangers,
to bare tongues,
but to stoke mythology
with holy legends in our guns.
