I heard America laughing its ass off
At high-noon over desert sands.
Zapping its top-secret hardcore joystick
In night-sweats out in No-Man’s land;
Down in the bowels of Iron Mountain
In a virtual free-fire zone
With its patented phantom death ray
And bully-boy robot drones.
Superman pledged allegiance
To the Looney tune tabloid news
As some money-bag killjoy muck-a mucks
And fat-cats in wingtip shoes
Lounged in a mushroom Cloud-9 headline
Over Alamogordo & Groom Lake
With payloads for crackerjack goofballs
And yoyos on the take . . .
Uncle Sam’s cartoon stunt-double
Yosemite Sam, went toe-to-toe
With every tin-horn dictator
To mainline the status-quo;
In the hardened underground silo
Of the dumbed-down American Dream,
He propped his klepto-plutocracy up
On potentate puppet regimes . . .
Ranges of Mother Earth were removed,
Rainforests clear-cut drilled,
Polluted rivers caught fire & burned,
Coral reefs bleached by oily spills —
More elbow room for the Almighty Buck!
And whatever its flim-flam can buy
Like a neon light blinking on & off
And a big dollar sign in the sky
In the free-for-all grand-slam smack-down
And knee-jerk genocide,
The deadpan cosmic comic strip
Where atoms split their sides,
A melting-pot of hired assassins,
Talking heads & god-damned fools
Lip-synch a grassroots sing-along
As we return to jungle rule.
E. P. Fisher
Pine Bush, NY
Blue Collar Review
Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature
http://www.partisanpress.org