Amerixa

Retaliation fantasies form in the breeze

To endow our fathers’ suffering with allegory

A snatch of sky seen through bars

Can satiate an imprisoned heart

As a breeze carries the smell of the sea a hundred miles east

Faint sigh, westward breeze to erode desolation

Where we are and where we’re going

Collides in every moment we remain stationary

Life eternal and an endless decay

Until our eyes shine like pearls

Obscured by the fog that weds heaven and earth

Sighs short and infrequent, gasps but for lack of energy

The way people talk in limbo, simple exhalations

A bare bleak pool of life

People alike in tastes, people alike in mind

Schools of tuna responsive to the mass movement

Towards safety, always safety

Nevermind those left behind

Those lives crucified in the daily news

Repellent in their agony, and now you know

Why people hold the paper at arms length

We understand suffering

But neither context nor degree make any sense

Deep down we see the sufferers culpable

Because we strong loathe those weak

Who hold our shared past in their cupped begging palms

To seek shelter in money in the search for sleep

But it whimpers all night long

That bloody thunder of pop culture

A rumble of wet voices

Youth as a festering wound that no longer heals

We trample salvation and never look at the ground

In Amerixa

Where life shines on the surface of days

And pop music is the soundtrack of our lives

We are all outcasts in Amerixa

The nature of our perceptions

Does not elevate the morality

Of the oppressed over that of the oppressor

How to live and die in a culture that denies humanity?

The isolation once felt by minorities

Now experienced by an intellectual minority

Emotion is the newest signifier of otherness

Meaning to be found in violence or stillness

Never easy motion

Let love be a gold blur around me

Like the halo of the moon

Words might not be worth much

But they’re a stable investment

Please help me Amerixa

I am fighting off a sickness

There’s a darkness on the horizon

Smokes pours from an abandoned factory

Awfully lively to be emptied of humans

I need no gurus nor their thick-soled shoes

I need you, Amerixa, to awaken to your dreams

Don’t just grab a bite to eat and steal a souvenir

There’s poison in our soil, and rotten planks in the ship of state

Nature has a language we’ve forgotten

Like the inexact memory of a beloved face

A smile half-remembered, but for how it made you feel

Where are the gentle baited souls always dreaming of death?

Where do they live in our asphalt brains?

A bullet would be innocent until soiled with our blood.