Prar

For the martyrs with their numbered tickets all standing in line for the headsman

How sweetly they sing the broken hymns of many languages all half-forgotten

Praising some deity the one deity that is all, you know who I mean

For the kids in broken homes who dream of all the great dreams a middle-class boy or girl

Should dream of at night

And during the day who dream of the tedium and stability of middle-class

Longing desperately for $20 to go to the movies and stare at the big grey canvas

With all its many thousand stories told

In rows upon rows of faux velvet chairs sitting eyes glued on the beautiful girl

The handsome man and ugly villain

Wondering why the differences between the superhero wallpaper

And the villainous monster hiding under papier-mache skin

Why they can’t be so discerned in real life

Never sure whether or not they’ll be dining with one or the other in the evening

Over plain meal and plainer conversation

Blessing the stray dogs and cats they pass who live the old American Dream

Who’ll die sooner than they’ll realize it

Dancing up and down the streets of today and tomorrow with laughter

And breathing in the smoggy air of capitalist doom who needs a future when you’ve got

Drugs?

Sex?

No, who needs a future when today’s still uncertain

Behind the closed curtains locked doors and lights-off lies

The truth of this diabolical form

The conventional chain strangling youth into conformity

Whitewashing their minds until the mighty soul is replaced with a

Porcelain throne for shit to be flushed down day in day out day in day out

Railroad tracks and railway cars flashing by like shooting stars in the night

With great rumblings and whistles blowing like a chorus of angels trumpeting

The fifth coming
Swimming in the inkwell river of black soot and stinking like sewage

Bathing in the working-class Ganges the dead spirits from last night’s glimpse

Of hope floating away away on their funeral pyre

In school brick oven torture for hours but you gotta go

You hafta go to get a good payin job an ta be better off than ya moms and pops

Bullshit

The American dream is dead

Reagan Killed It

Johnson Killed It with Fire

Truman Made it Glow

Roosevelt killed it twice in two separate lives

Hoover Killed It in Drag

Bush Claimed Victory Over It

Behold our Frankenstein’s monster our America

She’s hideous to the point of beauty

Bless her and all her poison all her stars and stripes and ammunition

And kilos of H and gallons of booze and dozens of famous corpses

Bless her with her shaking fits and dead dreams and new dreams

Both realized and unthought

Pray each night for her, she’s the only thing you got

Her veins run rich with the black asphalt Her brains glimmer on the seaboards

Left and East hemispheres flashing like strobes in the eternal whirling around our

Own yellow star

The martyrs know all about it

They think about it at night and during the day

They dream about it

They eat it with breakfast and lunch and dinner

They drink it down with a fifth of fireball then puke it back up a few hours later

It doesn’t sit well in anyone

The martyrs know all about it

But they don’t know they no like homo sapiens on Opposite Day

Except every day

Birds sing songs dropping hints streams babble a giggle the punchlines

Dogs howl and mourn that no one notices

Cats stargaze and purr, they don’t care

No one cares very much

The priest doesn’t care, he’s too busy waiting for God to pick up or call back

The politician doesn’t care, she’s too concerned with looking good to the young folk

The terrorist doesn’t care, he’s got conquest on the brain

Highschoolers don’t care, they’ve got better things to do

It’s alllllright, America cares somewhere in all her poison down at the heart she cares

Say a prayer for the mommies and the daddies they were kids very recently

They don’t know any better than their infant

Who knows better than an infant?

Raise that babe up to be a good and proper cog

Another cod-piece for display

Empty-dick

Winter only comes three times a year if you only give up twice

Say an extra prayer for the lost kid

They need it more than ever, they don’t have anything not a dream not a chance

Lost in haze and daydreaming Aeneids to a paradise in Hell

Say a prayer for the lost kid the lost kids, they’re the future, they’re the present, they’re the past

They’re what was, what is, and whatever shall be

Without end

Amn