WEBVTT

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Time I think for
three more poems.

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This is also an effort
at making a poem of sort

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of social survey.

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And what it's about
is it's about what

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some of the other poems have
had in them that it's ironic

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the way we're in the--

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we're in the richest
nation and superpower

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in the world, surrounded
by more material wealth

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than any country has
probably ever possessed,

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with a bottomless amount
of data available to us

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constantly and a huge
river of merchandise

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pouring over us all the time.

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And yet somehow we feel we're
suffering or at least I do.

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But, it's the suffering
that really in a way

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would be obscene
to complain about.

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And yet you feel you're
suffering somehow.

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So what suffering is that?

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And I sort of believe
in dialectical poems,

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poems that talk back and
forth from the different sides

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of an argument.

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And in this poem, I
made a student of mine

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represent that rather
ridiculous point of view

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so that I could then
make fun of the student.

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This is exactly what Socrates
does in his dialogues too.

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So and the poem is
called "America".

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"Then one of the students with
blue hair and a tongue stud

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says that America is for
him a maximum security

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prison whose walls are made of
Radio Shacks and Burger Kings

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and MTV episodes
where you can't tell

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the show from the commercial.

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And as I contemplate how
to express how full of shit

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I think he is, he
says that even when

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he's driving to the mall
in his Isuzu Trooper

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with a gang of his friends
letting rap music pour over

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them like a boiling jacuzzi
full of ballpeen hammers,

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even then, he
feels buried alive,

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captured and suffocated in
the folds of the thick satin

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quilt of America.

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And I wonder if this is a
legitimate category of pain

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or whether he's just spin
doctoring a better grave.

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And then I remember when I
stabbed my father in the dream

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last night, it was not blood but
money that gushed out of him,

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bright green $100 bills
spilling from his wounds.

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And this is the funny part,
he gasped, "Thank God.

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Those Ben Franklins were
clogging up my heart.

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And so I perished
happily freed from that

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which kept me from
my liberty", which

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is when I knew it was a dream
since my dad would never

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speak in rhymed couplets.

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And I look at the
student with his acne

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and his cell phone and his phony
ghetto clothes and I think,

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I am asleep in America too.

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And I don't know how
to wake myself either.

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And I remember what Marx said
near the end of his life.

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"I was listening to
the cries of the past

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when I should have
been listening

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to the cries of the future."

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But how could he have imagined
100 channels of 24-hour cable

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or what kind of nightmare
it might be when each day

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you watch rivers of bright
merchandise run past you

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and you are floating in your
pleasure boat upon that river.

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Even while others are drowning
underneath you and you see

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their faces twisting in
the surface of the waters,

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and yet it seems to
be your own hand which

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turns the volume higher."

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