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

(Photo Credit: 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.