This is not (my) America - No

 

Good Friday 25 x 19 cm mixed media on paper

The Trial 25 x 19 cm mixed media on paper

ORIGINS

The ones who came before us were

from lyrically named locations where the cheese smelled

strong and where the ladies didn’t always  

shave their underarms and hardly ever their legs

and where the common folk were hungry

most of the time except on feast days,

our ancestors having descended since then

upon someone else’s homeland with its streams

and rivers teeming with trout and other fish

and aboriginal skinny dippers   

whom we killed along with everything else that moved—

the habit of which is still with us, a great release apparently

for some of our more pent up citizens—

and measured out the land, the strongest

always getting more, naturally, though we were as ravenous 

in the end as at the beginning and always  

looking for a good deal and if we could get laid

in the bargain, then, hell yeah, more power to us—

beautiful and wild we continue to seduce who

ever catches our eye. Not unlike Bowie’s

Ziggy, we can “lick ‘em with a smile.” Every day the “Others”

push back and at the same time beg for more. “They

should know better,” utters a wised-up gnome, while his muse,

super cute but a bit of a scold, corn colored hair, freckles

and a slightly Asian cast to her eyes, peeks through her fingers.