Tuesday 18 September 2018

Tuesday Poem: "America Doubts Itself" by Andrew M. Bell


America,
the land of fat people is
now casting a thin shadow.
It is worried that it is not “great” any more.

It is afraid of China,
growing capitalist power out of
a communist socket.
Mao wouldn't have approved
of the American dollars bulging
in the people's pocket.

It has waged one too many
“interventions”, got too much
egg on its face.
It has been nine-eleven-ed and it has
lost its swagger.
It is tentative like a
teenager with its first bloom of acne.

And now it is banking on a saviour,
a man who epitomises The American Dream
when the myth has been stripped away,
a self-made man whose father left him a huge sum,
a swaggering, shouting misogynist
whose ego squeezes the air out of
every room. 

He is a man who has never known
hardship, never slept under a copy 
of The New York Times on a park bench
in a windswept, dangerous park,
never pushed his meagre belongings around
in a supermarket trolley,
never wandered the streets talking to himself
because no one else will,
never known the escape of the crack pipe or
the bottle and never
searched through a trash can for his next meal.

An older man is trying valiantly to resuscitate
the vision of your founding fathers,
but he will be bought off with party favours because
Big Money has you by the balls, America,
and is squeezing ever tighter.

Ave, America, morituri te salutant.
Hail, America, those who are about to die salute you.
Photo Credit: Andrew M. Bell

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