Americans love to get their bobby-soxers in a rumble; we like nostalgia at a penny a pound; we
blush Coke Red and ware Pepsi Blue: America the pre-packaged in sanitary cello fain for your
projection. Freud was a dalliance, but we prefer numbers, have left our black turtlenex in the
trunk of the Lincoln, have rounded forced and are rumbling home. Somebody needs to make a
sport of jumping privacy fences, one of the last defenses of the mythically modest. LBJ taped
himself discussing his nuts with a tailor from Texas: Johnson’s southern-fried ego a
manifestation of privilege, which is to say, in America, of paranoia. It could have been the meds,
though. Everybody was on ‘em: LBJ, Nixon, Elvis too. JFK, Norma Jean. Maybe not Kissinger.
He needed no help to collapse into the universal loathing that comes pre-packaged with power.
Americans absolve themselves, hide behind leadership to forget their roles when black-shrouded
Muslims dance atop boxes, the wires gator-clipped to their fingers–If you fall, you die. That
motto resounds from the Capitol down; it rolls through Wall Street like a cloud of choking dust,
the pulverized bits of glass and wallboard and CRTs pulmonating through, a benediction.
Which we couldn’t hear, wouldn’t because revenge is so much sweeter to the strong who, our
inner myth tells us, deserved it all along. America, home to juice boxes playing pop songs and
Pop Rocks on acid and the wavering from radio north a vague mummery rejiggered to sell jeans.
America, your midriff is bare; your navel dances into view, has forgotten the true and grooves to a new beat, syncopated with the pulses of A/C, modulated by an atom of industrial cesium
beneath a mountain in high Colorado, defensible, Colorado who would lead the souls lost to
secularism toward heaven or its simulacrum by parting the seas of regurgitated Reds or scything
down the weeds of the Fertile Crescent.
America, your thighs thunder.