No Shantytown

In America
Ain’t no shantytowns
Ain't no shantytowns
They’re all underground
Or stuffed into a shopping cart.

In America
You ain’t not alone
‘cept when you’re on the street:
Nobody you meet
Wants to take you home
sleep at a bus stop, here
Huddled in the evening news.

In America
Everyone got shoes.
No one has the blues;
They’re all underground
Shoved into a plastic bag.

Drowning down under the river
But the river ain’t there,
It ain’t nowhere
Ain’t no shantytown
Round here, anywhere.

This is America
Ain’t no poor man here,
And ain’t no bright noon sun
In America
To hide things from.

Note: The grammar in the poem is intentional.  It's not meant to render colloquial speech as much as it is to lend ambiguity to the statements.

Defense Department

Ground meat gristle war machine
with flag wave cross bone skull in green
it frenzy-feeds, farts and shits out
silver for the new Iscariot.
Kiss the race, the human face
shove your kids into its maw
hear the crow laugh, buzzards flap
sniff the stink of napalm death.
here’s the drug for you, my dear
meat on your plate, now chew, now chew
eat, choke clotted blood and spume,
exploded eye and swollen lung,
expose the spine and nerveless strings.
Ground meat gristle war machine
goes on and on across a plain
folded into fumaroles
where sky once was and in the fog
who sees the ugly ending come?

Metal machine drone insect wing
it roars and screams at everything.
it fills the bank with candy-jack
and slipper-blood and cadillacs
and everything for pretty princes
so witty, killing party jokes
anticipating tasty sorrow
lasting tears and ruined life
(that is no life, it’s just not death).
It really gets them off with glee
they spurt, the slackness flies so free
it's radiant like neutron waste
and glows on every poor man’s face
as they decide, like god above
how many towns to burn today;
and grinding gristle bone-machine
grabs hand and limb for grist and glean
to sweep the universe so clean,
the gleaming, shiny war machine;
the oligarchic endless dream
so safe in happy houses, free;
the Christmas tree is placed with care
above the salt-sown plain of fear.
Oh godly golden death, it gleams!
The gristle bone-crunch war machine.

Mobius Flip

 

 

Don’t tire me out with lies

you don’t know whys.

Don’t give me your sand castles

Or bitten apples

Awful strains to find remains

Of something easy to accrue

Put the pot down

Pour out a cup

And listen to once what’s around you.

 

It floats in transparencies

Outside the pharmacies

Flows without a personal ghost

Up and down if you’ll beam in

The happiness of losing self

And sense.

 

Don’t get comfy in the fat jacket, Jack

Get down under knees to see

Something a little elementary

What’s going on in the immediate, all around you

Down to your soul-feet sky.

 

Get in on this flipper dive

The mobius flip, alive, alive!

Get out of the trip, it’s jive

Check out your sister, brother

Fall in with a new crowd, cloud loud

The blades of tenderness, those little savage

Dander-lions in the slipstream of your one and only

Rising ball of earthly fury, Argus-eyed life.

 

Don’t kid yourself, kid

We never really miss a trick.