The Dying Democracy

My Country, ‘Tis Of Thee

1111.2010

A country with two right feet

staggers en route to injustice,

eating generations yet to come.

It travels from the eye of the pyramid

to senate seats emptied by companies—

ensuring emerald presidents in profusion.

It passes down to the gathering poor,

the plebs,

paying for the lie

of a dying skin color and its belief

before being trapped

and disposed of.

Refusing to walk the middle—

neither left nor right—

it blindsides its own citizens

by becoming something darker—

The machine:

I see the way America’s media detonates—

a dead man’s switch on rhetoric,

its factitiousness misleading ignorance further

as it hunts belief in the idioms

of spiritual ghosts.

“For which it stands.”

Who can, by a hair’s breadth, know what comes?

Not once do I make heads or tails of it—

not as I stand under attack,

balanced on the back of a machine

whose left cogs rotate barely,

barely oiled—

whose name used to be Republic,

whose cross to bear was integrity, not God’s,

and whose children were raised evenhanded.

Its death is neither right nor left,

but a fall

with two right feet.

m.c.f.