I’ll take a couple minutes,
if you think that you can spare a few
I’ll try to mask my bitterness
Like wild Berry theraflu

Sometimes I find things bearable,
I really do
Sometimes I’m marigolds and baby blue

Sometimes I make it twenty minutes
Without thinking to myself
how Those who chose to starve you
Will not take the time to stay and bury you

No chariots will carry you
To Arlington or Xanadu
Or lay you in the vacant space
that’s 6 beneath your panic room

This one’s for the native graves
on which we laid some tanning booths
That closed within a year,
and changed to Mom & Pop Italian Food
that got pushed out for Pizza Hut,
which got shut down for safety codes,
and, in the end, the building was demolished
for the danger posed

Now there’s just an empty field,
where little vegetation grows,
where, now and then,
you’ll think you hear the wind,
when there’s no wind that blows

Maybe it’s the echo
of the laughter of the Natives,
When they see how we can’t feed ourselves,
or fashion our own winter clothes

Watching us, like human moths,
all drawn where e’er the ember goes
With all the sea a garbage heap,
and mountains stripped like centerfolds

Down beyond the crater,
where the river flows,
Polyfluoroalkyl Trout
are mating in the witches grove

Each are casting dirty glances
Third eyes, courtesy Monsanto,
Glaring at the only trout with two
who dared to interlope


Maybe that was truly thunder,
Humming through the stone below,

or native spirits laughing
with a cackle like a thunder bolt

That rendered, in one brilliant flash,
to shattered glass, this sundered gloam,

or maybe it’s the rumble
of a humbling karmic undertow

Maybe we’ve been swept away by titan waves,
with plastic foam

So, every day, we gasp and writhe,
our hopes alight with phosphorus glow

Gods, what awful prospect to restore this nation’s monstrous soul

And yet, the concept
is a constant threat
of promise kept
to bait the polls

and then they take the votes
as far from all us nosey proles
as they can coast
on half the worlds reserves of coal

Take the rest to go
and try to overdose before they hit poles

Crashed a global market,
Broke a couple bones

Made a couple buddies,
Faked a dozen loans

Torched a lotta farms,
I bet you never heard

Cops were being cops,
They said a couple words

Over in the vacant lot on 23rd,

Someone traced the pizza hut from memory
in the ash and dirt

As I stood and stared, I heard the wind,
and yet, no wind had stirred,

Still, I found myself concerned
that I might see the sketch disturbed

I sat within a booth
outlined upon the vacant earth
as one might touch the only stone
still standing in their place of birth

Sick for dumb nostalgia
which the truly branded yearn

Then I heard their voices rushing past:

“You’ll NEVER learn.”
“You’ll NEVER learn.”