We ate the flag,
a cheese cake one with
berry stripes, sweet
after the tangy barbeque and the bite of beer.
But all night long we burped up stars
bursting like fireworks
in the black bedroom.
I lie awake in the night
wondering why we celebrate our country?
Back on childhood’s Western Avenue,
the rows of corn stand knee-high next to the freeway.
In Summer’s thumping heat,
I had swimming lessons in the blue village pool.
My sister hung me out the upstairs window.
JFK turns to his side, in a car,
and dies. We rent a TV to see
the funeral, my father standing
on the linoleum
when they play the star spangled.
We are on holiday at Cape Cod,
and a shirt-ful of steamers
is set for boiling and bowls of butter.
My father took me to Chicago in the train,
and we rode in an elevator
to his desk in the sky-
scraper, and sat me in his leather chair
with my legs hanging down.
Later, Martin Luther King Jr. leans on a railing
holding the bullets inside,
but no one told me.
None of us stood up for him.
Nor did I understand my childhood’s war
in the other world
of bamboo and napalm, and the color
of the cake was agent orange
and there was so little sweetness.
2
And how we slid from being
an engine in the world,
full of zest and freshness,
to this fat self-interest.
How greed waxed, and joy waned,
until history was just trotted out
once a year to justify guns, or fresh excess.
How squabbles were fanned into fires
and we lost the union, consumed for
short profits and the gratification
of a few.
When our collapse came
we barely noticed:
we were bickering like spoilt kids
as the car left the asphalt,
The tires shuddering in the air.
As we tumble,
I wonder,
Are the words that choke us
grateful to be free of us at last,
so that life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness
can find new throats,
new champions with less
avarice and more need?
