Realize that money itself is the curse,
the ghosts of electricity that Dylan
moaned about, well they were the
husks of a civilization that had
planted a bomb between its legs,
set to a timer, unable to unharness itself
to escape free.
You and I know better, you and I know better,
and Patty Hearst, you sit there
with your sisters, and all they can
do is cry
confounded by the mere power of existence
while around foot soldiers dyin' and tryin'
and around you they blanket the soil
with neurotoxins and even put that shit
in the substance you eat.
Vomiting up plastic scavenged from the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
brought to Geiger-friendly
Midway Atoll, transferred by regurgitation
con amor, into the little one's belly,
whose stomach is never empty and never full.
How does it feel, to be on your own,
in the deep doodoo of our thankless bondage,
watching forces not your own,
do good, do bad, carve out
wildernesses of uninhabitable hostility?
I am of the people, I am separated by a guard,
my fabric is your fabric, is not my fabric––
Come on, even Trump wants to breathe
clean air, eat genetically unmodified steaks
that degrade in time, unlike McWhatever––
especially Trump.
Only he thinks that others should pay and pay.
The smell of a world that has burned.