poem 202 of a poem a day for 2012

ring out your dead America

I love skipping stones

skeletal keying my name inside

each ripple, nipple squeezing

the easy clever sleaze for laughter

drawing circled curtains of it

in the ways light finds a shine

outside the edge of a closed door

in arrested song and dance

make everyone forget

you can’t remember who you are

or might have been once

without the many faces of one long poem

another skip another dead piece of me

wants one more look at the clouds

one more reach one more note

in my odd jaunts and cellular thirst

I am bone-scribing my raw

and ready will to survive

in rides wave after wave

to crumbling lands of opportunity

I am a tendril spawn full of go

without a steering wheel passing gas station

after gas station selling electric messiahs

at the counter currency exchange for fate

or other mechanisms of empty soul

the law says this is why you’re here

this is why you feel naked without clutching nostalgia   

America what have you become

why do you let politics rob

the souls of good men and women

turning them into laser-ed hunger

with ancient rituals of algebra and prime numbers

meant for the telling of stories of worst case scenarios

as everyday occurrences candied and packaged neat

as a need to stop someone from taking something from you

so you tell me to go get a gun and shoot

every motherfucker who doesn’t understand pain

and isn’t worth the explanations we dress to the nines

on the evening news with its flash burn emotions

and the constancy of the word freedom

America you are becoming more and more, hollow

branding who you are becoming onto me as I am becoming you

I only remember how to spell the word freedom

I have never known what it means

never feeling its dream except during sex

though that could be just another ruse

or fuse lit to get inside you’re velvets

I am sure I would deny it if asked

but there is no cost met when a moment is filled with mean

so America behind your closed doors and filthy streets

your closed minds and filthy nails is this what you want to cask

and age like an Amontillado that will show everyone who asks

what color is the taste of you

when some distant species will have dug you up

to clinically document what you were

will you be just like all the animals

you have pushed onto a paper memory

waiting in line for a soul to steal into

and a body crawling the tides of midnight

knowing eventually a Dawn with no need for words

and the kind of chains your freedom bring

will rise and lift every bow to where

we might all skip stones and watch

the early morning mist lift the veils

with each wrist turn we sail another stone

listening, peering, nearing the vocabulary of

what a smile shared is again

EJR ©