The America I remember

The Surgeon General smoking

Marlboro Man cigarettes, priests

altering the minds of altar boys,

the President himself up on charges

of sexually harassing women 

between speeches on family values.

Brand new cars parked in the lots

of towers of imported steel,

everyone an executive manager

of somebody else’s financial deals.

Dollars crisp and clean spilling

out of Automatic Teller Machines

where new leaves once grew on trees, 

smog obliterating the horizons,

oil choking once sacred beaches,

the seagulls gasping

for recognition.

Gangster kids, cheating teachers, 

out-of-control credit cards,

bankrupting the possibility

of saving a single dime.

Mortgage payments outlasting

the houses, the so-called owners

of the houses.  Apple pie crust,

a glue of preservatives,

plastic surgeons carving

eternal doll faces,

unable to save the dolls.

Artists pleading for audiences,

truckers speeding on speed,

heroin eyes, marijuana ennui,

my own mother afraid 

of the night-time streets

in a town so small and sweet,

everyone knows everyone’s creed

and drug prescriptions.

The snow mountains sinking,

the desert canyons slipping,

Death Valley itself dropping below

sea level, closer and closer to Beijing.

Juan Rosales serving Mexican booze

and Chinese chicken tacos to film stars,

in unlit, dull as old flame bars,

the Cambodian student flunking

English 101 because she can’t study

and work three jobs as well—Hell,

just to keep donuts in the house,

how she escaped over the barbed wire fence

of the Kmer Rouge concentration camp,

risking her life for the documentary dream

of Abraham Lincoln’s sainthood.

For what?  She wants to know

because the slaves are still slaves

she says, and I cannot answer her now,

nor could I then, or before,

riding the bus five hours

a day to keep the landlord out

of the palimony courts.

God, a word we trusted,

like the made-in-the USA bordellos.

I remember every pizza parlor,

every fast food fry shack.

Mostly I remember the shadow men,

their impotent beds,

insomnia swelling their lids,

adrenalin of terror

keeping them going

nowhere and everywhere

at once in instantaneity. 

When I remember America

I think of the Warm Springs Indian

Reservation, how the people took me in,

feeding me Deschutes River salmon for weeks,

singing, rattling, dancing the Medicine

until there is no more home

to come home to,

I say, falling asleep

and into my self

11,000 miles away

from San Clemente’s nuclear plant

perched like a huge temple

on the best shore of California waste.

Yes, I remember,

 remember,

 remember.

 I do not dare to forget.