THE AMERI___ _R___ (5:35pm)
You can sleep
when you’re dead
but you can’t be alive
in a city that lets
you breathe
The swag bag
includes
a complimentary
climate change
bathing cap &
a bottle of
purified water
We are hobbyists
at the convention
getting ecofucked
Ice is melting
just before the storm
says this, my gobbler nation,
I, AMERICA, MER OF ICE-NOMOAR
AM ERA OF CALAMITY
AM ARIA OF BROKEN HINGE.
IMPLODING STRUCTURES
& GONE FULL
DESTROYER TO REACH
EACH & HIM OR HER OWN.
FUGUE OF THE FEW & FEWER.
you, citizen, are a mere cutout.
i am most holy & without need of you.
the dream drum is ruptured.
an ear through with hearing.
i am america, all ears of corn & starch-ornery.
i am preparing my arsenal against your marches.
i am weaponing into the Anthropocene.
loading the rivers with forever toxins.
overflowing my banks with monopoly money.
my arterials are designed to survive nuclear attack.
a state un-personed yet full with paths, forked and forking.
i was ready for the end of the world in 1945.
my poetics are atomic. are autonomous.
are the raison d’être for your automobiles.
my gut is swole. i smoothe your soles
& send you wild-chasing after
disinformation, & misinformation.
i bed you with lies.
lap you with my lion tongue.
am a kingdom full with smaller kingdoms
swallowed down.
when the lamb came to lay with me i ate him belly first,
saving not a chop for wolf or fly. certainly not for my hungrier cities.
i will replace the sky’s tenants
with machines of all sizes.
take your earth & your under-earth
& your overearth. boil your roiling seas.
i am broad-stuffed & marching to my own tune,
tectonic decibels screaming with the pounds
from these im/possible feet.
ritualized toxicities & limbs limp in my maw.
my liberty bell is not all that is cracked.
my innerface is mere interface.
should you grab my handle it will break off.
& says my Citizen:
EMPIRE, UMPIRE OF BATS & brutal balls, biggest:
READ ME MY WRONGS & FREEDOM WRUNG.
[read me my wrongs because Juridico is the largest country,
by & of the original gobbler ready with its ropes and lashings]
i have been given my national assurance:
free & dumb as a bloody bird is how i will have my foul snack.
oh america, largest machine of corporate speak,
corpse libations flood your guzzle-wide chambers.
& likewise gun chambers, diffuse orchestras of done & drone.
america, my citizen can longer be what is throng with you.
such a condition — like so many — is insufficient.
my throng is a rush of run-off & run-through.
nation of parking lots & automobiles,
you know only speed & tumble.
i dream of you tearing through the last wood.
razing every last tree. using palm oil as gargle.
america, i’ve seen your dreams
cut a person into endless halves,
scene of the division soaked.
vapor eyes cloud thick
& the oh-zone is outlawed
& outstripped.
why just this shortest wick, the quicker thrill?
why this brutal domination?
in this arc Hive of globalizing fever
we breed drones of all sizes,
messengers of an un-worlding
sting & stung.
More police officers means shutting down from the Delaware to the Turnpike. More police officers means slowing down city hall from rallies competing for clean air. More police officers means you may never reach the bridge.
More police officers means more police officers singing the ‘X-Files’ theme song to themselves, means more police officers feeling lucky that they were caught along the river with more police officers where the currents open-carry more police officers to where they’ll float downstream on inner-city-tubes inflated with more police officers celebrating more police officers in certain places.
Hillary Clinton’s not an American.
Bill Clinton’s not an American.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not an American.
The Democratic Party is not an American.
Wells Fargo is not an American.
Wharton School of business is not an American.
Trump is not an American.
The Republican Party–which is the KKK–deport the Republicans.
Deport the Democrats.
Where to?
Who wants them?
Maybe the desert.
Maybe the desert wants them
without food or clothes.
We’ll call that the blue life–crawling in the desert naked
without food or water
trailing Donald Trump’s ass
melting…
In Cold War school
they told us you
can make it
from nothing.
You
You
You by yourself
a baby capitalist
crawling thru a hallway
like the desert
of a nothing country.
Let us make it then
from nothing.
Let us fill the streets
like water.
who built the white house?
who tilled the soil?
who worked the land?
who fed your babies milk stolen from her own, out of wide, chapped nipples?
who passed babies through another’s clean alabaster legs?
who left her own babies on the side of the scorching field,
face draped in a rag
shielding them with hope or detachment or both?
who watched the sun set again and again on their shackles?
who built the ships that held us?
who steered them as we churned inside their bellies?
who met us at the port with grease for our faces and coins to buy us,
the ship a matchbox bobbing in the vast Atlantic?
who’s arm threw us overboard and who filed an insurance claim with the same arm?
who donned capes and hoods as spooks to scare us?
who firebombed our homes?
who collects on our underwater mortgages?
who chased us to the fragile city to preserve their living space?
who exploited us in the factories?
who fires us for no reason?
who hangs us up by the neck until we bloat?
who steals our children for another and another ungodly war?
who shoots but does not know why but shoots all the same?
who will never be tried for his crimes?
who decides what is a crime?
who decides black murder is never a crime?
II.
I too still out here singin america
i, forgotten, long lost sibling
black sheep but still black
and after all, in exile.
america still got cracks and faults in it
i still sit in the kitchen when company comes
and i will never be beautiful, they did not see.
those who chained you will continue to chain me,
an unbroken line back over the ocean.
my mind jumps back to the pit where they threw us.
my mind jumps back to the ocean that could have swallowed
us whole. 50 million, maybe more gone to history
living as uncategorized entries in an archives
buried to history, stolen away.
I am watching a work of art dissolve its way forward. I’m told that at the RNC site in Ohio, some of the letters just keeled over, leaving “Eric anDre” up last, the name of a comedian.
Things have gotten both unimaginably worse and unexpectedly better in my span on Earth. Two rivers running fast simultaneously, and countless tiny streams. Like the path of water, the life of a work of art—a poem or song or sculpture—is not predictable.
The RNC was a bonafide disaster; their candidate recalls the malformed despots who inherited their positions after generations of genetic devolution, not those elected by an informed populace in a democratic republic. Remember this poem (oft quoted during the W. Bush Era)?
England in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley
As the sculptors who conceived and installed this piece, Ligorano and Reese, point out, art starts and abets conversation, a work is not an end in itself.
This particular incarnation of The American Dream is carved into the American dollar font, a happy, jovial type that makes me think of the circus and silver dollar coins.
All of the letters are still standing. The “I” and “C”—first to go up on their pedestals—are not looking too good. People have been putting their palms on the letters, dumping buckets of run-off water on themselves, enlisting strangers to take their pictures as they pose, taking selfies.
Squeaking and whistling, the ice is melting more quickly than anyone expected.
No, that is a lie; when the polar ice caps disappear, everyone who has access to the news will have been aware of the process for decades.
The United States are burning all over the place in more ways than one:
https://weather.com/maps/current-heat-index
We find it self-evident that we and the other mammals will shortly be boiling in our own skins.
I would like to experience a female President of the United States before then. I voted for Hillary in the 2008 and this spring’s primaries, and I will vote for her in November. She has the capacity to govern better than she campaigns, and the salutary effects of even mere symbolism should not be underappreciated. I have not liked everything that Barack Obama has done for our country, and there will certainly be much to enrage, confuse, and disappoint in Clinton’s Administration, but I have also never taken Obama’s election for granted.
As a middle-aged Korean American woman, I would like to live in a society in which a female person’s experience and expertise are valued. I would like to not have to carefully consider how my words will be perceived after being refracted through sexism and misogyny. I would like to not have to deal with missteps being magnified to extreme proportions by men who admit no error and commit vulgarities daily. I would like to operate in a world in which repulsive men go to prison instead of being buoyed up to ridiculous heights. I would like to be able to walk down the street, go to work, and to the gym and other public places without fear of being harassed or worse.
In my lifetime, I have heard perspectives and lives represented in ways that I never expected them to be, as a young woman or child. Many of these changes have happened just in the last decade. I was never told that I could be President, and by the time I reached college, I was convinced that that would be an impossibility for a woman and racial minority, but I’m glad that other people of color and women were given to believe otherwise.
I would like to live without feeling like I need to apologize for everything, even my optimism.
Today July 25, 2016
American Dream
Did it come before the darkness
The thought, the Idea
Before, when the land was clean and free
Free Free Free
no need for dreams or dreaming
green flowers water blue sky creatures sea ocean
no charge or tv screens pictures of fear
the sun is burning too hot
the Ice is melting
our skin is melting
American Dream comes from a sideshow Joe selling Dream Potions, that will rot your insides, erode your skin…
Believe your skin
you have already created your own…
So, the action of the sculpture is dispersal not disappearance, which seems like an apt and more nuanced metaphor. Letting a unified and simple thing become multitudinous, roving, and infinitesimal. Is that depressing? Is that a bad thing?
If one is The American Dream, does one have more meaning as a block of ice or as an underground stream and shape-shifting clouds?
When I hear the phrase “The American Dream” I recall that it has something to do with the promise of prosperity and the idea that anyone can be anything, if they try hard enough, although I’m not even sure if that’s accurate. It’s been a while since I thought about this set of words.
Someone mentioned to me that the slogan was invented in the 19th century. A quick search turns up the date of the phrase’s entry into public discourse as 1931, coined by someone named James Truslow Adams, a popular historian, in his book The Epic of America.
The phrase certainly has a mid-20th-century ring to it. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, I also recall that this sunny, aspirational mantra was not a hard sell back in the day. People—my parents, my grandparents (my mother’s adoptive parents—German and Scottish American supporters of Civil Rights and other progressive ideals)—seemed to believe in these words. They believed that American society was improving. They passed along those sanguine ideas to me.
Which was certainly beneficial. If I hadn’t believed that I could do things, I wouldn’t have tried to do what I did. Disillusionment is a painful but small price to pay for the igniting flash of hope, however ephemeral or unfounded.
To be sure, my own sense of doggedness has had many sources and probably had little to do with the amorphous notion embodied by the phrase now dripping before my eyes. There’s this Korean proverb:
“Even though a tiger is biting you, if you gain consciousness, (you can) live.”
—a more pragmatic and precise formulation of a similar concept.
Of course, many American persons never hear such words or emboldening messages and are instead bludgeoned by circumstances that obliterate that message, turning it into a taunt—something meant for other people, with the price of their prosperity paid for by our sacrifice, which is bodily, material, psychic, spiritual, personal, and communal.
And, of course, the slogan is a much harder sell now for American persons of the middle class than it was when I was a little girl. It’s possible that the only people who believe in it now are those who think the dream was taken from them by people like my parents or myself, and those who have come from places of such devastation that working 15-hour days and not being bombed daily comprises relative relief.
If you are working that much and that hard every day of your life, a vaporous saying may or may not figure at all, and why would anyone ever hold your extraordinary resolve against you?
You are smiling dearie. Your tongue is out. The syrup meets your youthful lips with a relief, and a color that is not your own. Meanwhile THE SIGNS stagger past window after window.
You put your indivisible head down on the invisible decrees. THE SERPENT they say has cast you past castigation. You dream of the words through the windows, lying like milky Popeful lies. They say black. They say white. They say no signs here today. But THE SIGNS are here. Your palms are printed as the bone of history…
You’re going to make it work for you. You toggle ancient claws with a blink, as they prepare THE ICE. You consider the reach of the letters. They call no man father. They follow you through the windows, while you keep to your dreams. You could reach outside. You could reach all the way back to the 4th of July, or THE RAINBOW BRIDGE. You reconsider.
Your cheek grows chilly colder. THE SNAKE dismembers THE SIGNS. You are the sleepy visitor, yourself as ever. Sipping away insipidly, you are so easy. Not a letter in THE WORLD can save you.
