They tell me I’ve changed,
but they don’t know the half.
They say I’ve lost my mind,
but it was never mine to begin.
—At an art fair in Southern Indiana
artists peddle their overpriced wares, nice as they are,
to the interested disinterested masses
who will go home carrying mostly what they came with.
There’s a fat, red-faced white man wearing a bow tie and straw hat,
his shirt wet with salty sweat,
holding the reins to his horse-drawn carriage,
sitting beneath the shade of the built-in canopy,
while his slave horses bake in the sun on the hot pavement
beside God’s Christian church where they’re serving chicken breasts
to the old folks bused in from who-the-fuck-knows-where.
(Little do any of these, the old fat fucker, or God even care as long as they all get what they came for: money, a meal, obedience.)
A racially mixed crowd marches through the streets protesting the KKK,
who are protesting Goddamn knows what.
However, the straight-piped Harleys drown them both out
in a sea of roaring CCs, with attitudes to match.
Thick smoke drifts up in the hot still air from the food corridor,
where folks revel on the flesh of my friends,
invading like a mob in a creepy zombie film show,
immersing clothes, hair, and eyes in a rancid haze
nauseating the senses of the sensitive,
while I buy six dollars a bar, handmade soap
—only because it’s vegan.
A few miles down, in middle of the road, a deer lies slowly dying,
her legs twitch, her eyes alert.
Hit by a distracted driver posting selfies to Instagram—
because the bitch thinks she’s special and can.
With 4000+ faux Facebook friends, what other possible conclusion is there?
Well, I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
The Millennial’s mother told her, she was special,
and so she believes it.
Well, she’s not and neither are you.
—Unless you’re doing something special, you’re just another
run-of-the-mill, bottom-dwelling crap-sucker
sucking hind tit off an Empire struggling
to defeat 30,000 Taliban
while it taunts a billion Chinese
and a million Russians into war,
set to the music of a nuclear finale.
But still, its dutiful citizens pledge allegiance.
(Except for a handful down on one knee.)
And the nation prepares to make it all better
by voting to be, “Stronger Together.”
A megalomaniac on one side a psychopath on the other,
take your pick, red or blue, it doesn’t fucking matter.
Meanwhile a white teenager, his hair in dreadlocks,
takes a brow beating from a black girl, her hair in dreadlocks,
both look hip as shit, but accusing him of
“Cultural Appropriation.”
What the fuck?
Who starts all this confrontational interpretation?
In my time, and I know that’s irrelevant,
it was that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
No more, now it’s a personal affront.
Another goddamn wedge forced between people
pretending to fight for social justice,
while they rob liquor stores and steal TVs
from their own neighborhood establishments.
And nobody realizes they’re being played to the hilt,
by an elite who’s dead-set on destroying us all for a trillion bucks,
and the power to match.
…they say I’ve changed.
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