American Dreaming

Alone
But for the dubious company of a mangy, festering dog,
The bearded bored dreamer might imagine
A decidedly different life
In which he turns down that first snort of brown powder.
But the dream has become a formless distorted delusion,
Floating in inky clouds within the small tube of a disposable syringe.
It takes only five minutes to cook the venom,
The bearded dreamer knows.
He holds a spoon,
The most simple implement for this,
Above an indoor open flame.
The dust turns to sludge turns to dirty water,
Which is when our junkie knows to place a cut up a fluffy cotton clump
Into the concoction.
With tweezers, he deftly swirls it within the sullied solution.
After it’s become just ready,
He softly introduces the needle over the brownish ball of white,
Draws in the murky drug around it.
This is a filter.
The thin, plastic dispenser, now filled to the brim
with our dreamer’s transient comfort,
A brief respite from the world,
In which he is less than a bug to the predatory youths
Who’ve dropped out of school to
Grind on dirty ghetto stoops,
Always careful,
Always angry,
Never deigning to discourage
An impossibly emaciated derelict dreamer,
Who keeps his money in a cup.

Where was the American Dream before the inner city,
The hellish violent holding regions where we wash our hands of nightmares?
There was no dream before we made it necessary to create one,
To control the dense, chaotic clamor of ships sunk low in the water,
Laden with immigrants.
Dreamers, just like our junkie,
Hoping to find a new beginning and future where there is
No Potato blight to create catechetic children,
No Mussolini to persecute and torture the casual acquaintances of his enemies,
No Franco Regime to capture and kill Catholics and Anarchists,
No Holocaust to liquidate the Gypsies, the Gays, the Madmen and the Jews,
No Ottoman Deathmarches to force thousands of Armenians to slow slogging ends,
No Compulsory combat service for parents to watch their sons shepherded onto gunbound trains.
The American Dream,
Once a noble notion of ambition and home-ownership,
Has been morphed by an increasingly perceptive society.

The New American Dream is gangbanging,
Is gambling,
Is block-by-block dominance of housing projects,
Is getting high and taking it easy.
The New American Dream eschews the worker ethics,
Because they are the same ethics held by the wealthy oppressive control caste.

Our junkie, though,
Our dreamer,
Cares nothing for revolutions.
Our junkie slips the needle into one of the few veritable veins,
Left unhardened and unhidden after years of unending escapism,
Pulls red streams out,
Pushes brown release in,
Nods off into his American Dream
By the dim light of a naked bulb,
Hanging like a fat spider from the drooping, drenched and damaged ceiling,
The only sky he knows.

The Condors

Updrafts loft great dark wings higher,
Beady eyes arduously reaching for Earth’s end.
She may fly for days until some piece of meat,
Male or carrion or both,
Catches her harsh stare,
Whereupon she’ll swoop down in great,
Leaping spirals.
Beautiful and articulate,
She speaks for a desperate, dying race,
In a quailing voice.

Huge black birds,
Intelligent like pigs,
Ply the skies
For a cure to the scavenger’s
Endemic solitude.

Another cry answers,
A pair,
A rare sort of thing.
These are the birds least likely to breed.

Power lines bend toward ground for them,
Car hoods, too, quake under the weight of
The condors.

Long necks
Nuzzle
As they couple on a Buick.