Of white picket prisons
and sham tear-jerk churches:
the paperwork nation,
fed weekends by an iron fist (the invisible hand)
on a stomach full of butterflies and pharmaceuticals
in a space painted gray by faith
where if everyone thought differently you would think the same, so
the cookie cutter suburbs have won
with billboards for horse blinders
window shopping for fig leaves
for a life that moves under glass, we
we turn trees into telephone poles
while cursing hte birds for chirping,
their songs drowned out by a procession of dinosaurs
on the highways wider,
for the disposable home
god, what blind pride must we have to sleep this dream?


And amended, we run slowly like under water, like in dreams from authority, by apologizing for politics
for the confines of this dream are lined by:
the gone pinecones and black bear,
the aborigine; Mount Rushmore is trespassing appeased with a bottle.
the wholesale theft of africa; our civilization takes itself for quarantinebut
the white man's burden, it is the ego of Rome
spreading literacy here
and the electric chair


and so, running slowly we are, pouring water over the heads of everyone across
fifty lands attached by tumbleweed
that prays for cowboys.
So give me the biggest city
or the patchwork ocean of waving prairies,
the old and elderly in the south - doors ajar on a front porch in July where the locust roars in the
cattails and the moon is smeared with the butts of lightning bugs.
Take me to the end of property, out in Big Sur, where for once our past precedes us
And meet me Henry Ford, to shake his hand on Highway One, but punch him on the Seventy
See me Ansel, the western blood-shot reds of the canyons blown open
by the artery of the Colorado
A road runs through it
to the clay and craw-deads of the Ozark,
to the dripping hemlocks of the Carolinas: built to the thump of bluegrass.
Smell me the log fires in long autumns of the northeast; the leaves turn in the smoke of early night.
Slide me down the river Huck, free and easy, on the Mississippi, and Bingham paint me
with furs to bring to the ports of New Orleans
for chance is cheap.
Then look back, Kerouac, across your groaning country and wrap a clicking tongue like jazz
around the gone roads of San Francisco
when at your back the sun slopes (for the world the day is done),
left for you a watercolor sky;
left for the cobblestone of the east
and in between the "if" for us


Because have you ever swept the empty street of this dream, where we have invented rock and roll?
Where thousands of evicted religious came with their versions of hell and pointed finger.
Where the Big Dipper dumps crickets into the Grand Canyon at night
Where we, the leavers, given the weight of the road, create sounds like the Blues,
Bittersweet and sea sick tumbling on a closing frontier
with an amnesia in our slumbers....
If we ever woke up would we be reconciled?

ok...that worked. *sigh*

"long posts are automatically hidden to avoid nasty people flooding the website with crap."

--dodgygeezer

Yeah, sorry about that. You need to contact a mod to get the post enabled (although since you've posted this I won't bother).

I really should put that in the text of the message...

nice--your poem?

Vote for the poem.

while cursing hte birds for chirping,

Why is that? I love hearing and watching birds.

birds are fucking annoying. Especially when you work through the night without sleep, then when it starts to get early in the morning those bastards start chirping.

A fucking men....puke & cry!!

this is actually a work in progress...a mind dream of a travelling fiend of mine

he wants to change some words, because he is embarassed by it's roughness.

btw...when i was trying to make the original post, 'amend' was the title, with a [more inside] directly following...so i didn't think a limit on post length would come into play.

he is on his way to france, and i only get to hang with him until thursday...i'll make the most of it

Really nice, Schyler. I especially like the third stanza.

On a related note, I've heard that while the U.S. represents 5% of the world's population, it accounts for around 30% of its resource consumption and produces half of its toxic waste. These figures are mind-boggling.