A Blues Poem About the United States of America
How is this our country?
I live in the land of the free
home of the brave, good ole USA
where friends have to find
antibiotics on the street
because their side hustles
and full-time jobs don’t come
with benefits.
Got cancer and no insurance?
Rest in pieces, the sooner the better.
This free land is where
you must be brave to go
to elementary school, the movies,
bars, work at the capitol in DC
because this land of the free,
built on the backs of slaves
pillaged and stolen from indigenous peoples
is founded on toxic history
atrocities that are stuffed deep
in the backseat of greed
broken dreams fallacies.
Hustle used to be a word for pimps
now it’s also a word for creatives, writers
Only Fans and modern-day sex workers.
It’s a gig economy
Capitalism is toxic as fuck and it
will fuck us up.
Education? Pink Floyd sang about that.
Who needs it anyway?
We’ve been mass-produced into
the economy of all-hail-to
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk
The 1%. Is it a crime to be rich?
Naw.
Is it a crime to be as rich as Jeff Bezos
and evade taxes? Fuck, yeah.
This culture of “Pull yourself up
by the fucking bootstraps!” and
“Figure it out for yourself, by yourself,
you mother fucker!” The Individualist lie —
that’s fucked up.
Children in cages and walls around borders.
I remember when the Berlin Wall crumbled.
I was in elementary school. It was good news.
What have we come to in this free, brave
mass shooter hustle culture poverty-stricken grind society?
Humans are meant to be connected
in love, as one — into a greater good
Humanity.
When I was a kid and saw social discrepancies
like homelessness and hunger
my heart said to the adults, fix it. This is unacceptable.
Now we call starvation food insecurity. Semantics move us
further away from the despair of starving children
housed or homeless right here in the land of the free, home of the brave.
How the hell is that okay
when there’s enough food in the whole wide world to
feed everybody?
World wide web our food supply, in equity.
Am I a socialist? Maybe.
Can we agree every human, no matter what you think of them,
because love your enemy and all that,
deserves their basic needs met — love, food, shelter, water,
education, a way to contribute to the greater good, to be part of a community.
It can be the art installation of our current existence.
Who’s in?
