Time I think for three more poems.
This is also an effort at making a poem of sort
of social survey.
And what it's about is it's about what
some of the other poems have had in them that it's ironic
the way we're in the--
we're in the richest nation and superpower
in the world, surrounded by more material wealth
than any country has probably ever possessed,
with a bottomless amount of data available to us
constantly and a huge river of merchandise
pouring over us all the time.
And yet somehow we feel we're suffering or at least I do.
But, it's the suffering that really in a way
would be obscene to complain about.
And yet you feel you're suffering somehow.
So what suffering is that?
And I sort of believe in dialectical poems,
poems that talk back and forth from the different sides
of an argument.
And in this poem, I made a student of mine
represent that rather ridiculous point of view
so that I could then make fun of the student.
This is exactly what Socrates does in his dialogues too.
So and the poem is called "America".
"Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
says that America is for him a maximum security
prison whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings
and MTV episodes where you can't tell
the show from the commercial.
And as I contemplate how to express how full of shit
I think he is, he says that even when
he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper
with a gang of his friends letting rap music pour over
them like a boiling jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers,
even then, he feels buried alive,
captured and suffocated in the folds of the thick satin
quilt of America.
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain
or whether he's just spin doctoring a better grave.
And then I remember when I stabbed my father in the dream
last night, it was not blood but money that gushed out of him,
bright green $100 bills spilling from his wounds.
And this is the funny part, he gasped, "Thank God.
Those Ben Franklins were clogging up my heart.
And so I perished happily freed from that
which kept me from my liberty", which
is when I knew it was a dream since my dad would never
speak in rhymed couplets.
And I look at the student with his acne
and his cell phone and his phony ghetto clothes and I think,
I am asleep in America too.
And I don't know how to wake myself either.
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life.
"I was listening to the cries of the past
when I should have been listening
to the cries of the future."
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
or what kind of nightmare it might be when each day
you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
and you are floating in your pleasure boat upon that river.
Even while others are drowning underneath you and you see
their faces twisting in the surface of the waters,
and yet it seems to be your own hand which
turns the volume higher."