Some don’t respond when you address them
Directly
Some trip you on accident
Then laugh about it
Some trip you on purpose
Then laugh about it
They yak away on cell phones
Drive SUVs, eat saturated fats
Don’t read, don’t eat cow or chicken
Eat too much cow or chicken
Carry political ideas that make no sense
Make loud noises in quiet places
Buy 30 dollar shirts
100 dollar shoes
80 dollar backpacks
400 dollar jewelry
150 dollar cell phones with anytime
Minutes
They fight over the opposite sex
Drink beer until their livers die
Smoke until their lungs die
Smoke dope until their brains die
Take acid until reality disappears
Do drugs until they die, period
They make fun of people with no legs
Or people with no brains
Or people with too many brains
Or too much weight
And in turn these people,
Hated
Hate in return, and fight
Over their own unmentionable infirmity
And members of the opposite sex
They listen to songs glorifying everything destructive
They listen to songs meaning nothing
And make those writers rich
While I am poor
While heartfelt honesty goes unfed
And the next Mozart dies behind a Costco
Where they sell all those big screen TVs,
That inevitably, the poor people buy
And inevitably, people die
They don’t notice this.
They hide from it with religion
And they hide behind it by
Striving for the upper class
While doing drugs
And talking on cell phones
And glorifying everything destructive
Moms beat Dads
Dads beat Moms
Dads beat kids
Moms beat kids
Moms and Dads drink and
smoke pot and
drop acid and
smoke and
hold funky political agendas, talk on cell phones and
beat their kids
Kids beat kids
Kids shoot kids
Kids drop acid and
have cell phones and
have machine guns and
write nothing and
read nothing and
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed by stereotype beaten
Like animals fighting for existence
Though callow
And they don’t even realize it
Poor fools
Religion is treated like
Abercrombe & Fitch
People buy it, wear it
They have no idea
Nor do they even care
Who the hell Abercrombe & Fitch are
Red letters on the sweater
A 90 dollar sweater
M&Ms and payday,
Lucky Strike and Red Hots
Raisinets and Mitsubishi
Nintendo and Sega and
Jansport (Goobers)
Baby Ruth and the Brady Bill
The Brady Bunch and Elian Gonzales
Tom Brokaw and the Red Menace
Norman Schwarzkopf, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, oil embargo
wars, wars, wars, wars
This is a song of dead eyed children
Red-eyed college students
Mean eyed mothers
Tired armed Dads
Hollow eyes of high school
And a lack of motivation
Caffeine culture and Communist Russia
This is a song
for the
beaten
Living on a street called Indian
Where everybody drinks
Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake
Jay Leno, crack
Hate and religion and
Money and cell phones and
God Bless America
(he can’t, he’s dead)
Time magazine and Joseph Heller
The Eternal City and
The kids don’t read
They blame it on Mommy hitting them
Or Daddy hitting Mommy
Or crack or pot or
Punk Rock music, Allen Ginsburg, Alan Greenspan
A coal mining town
Cell phones
Nothing to do, and therein lies
Responsibility
May he rest in peace
May she rest in peace
Killed on the front porch with an
AK-47 reading Nathan McCall and
The Tacoma News Tribune
I looked at them an embryo
I looked at them a college graduate
Dropout
I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke pot
I don’t wear Abercrombe & Fitch
I don’t own a cell phone
But I’m just as guilty. I’m nothing special
I’m just as guilty of structure
“And I am”
a spondee,
an anapest,
and
an extra stress
But what am I?
I cannot even analyze this last sentence
Much less people’s motivations
Flick Webb, Dan Rather
Jenny McCarthy, Douglass Macarthur
Salmon Rushdie, Saul Williams
Where are you?
Where am I?
Where are we?
And are we beaten yet?