I wrote this poem last week, in order to help me process the tragedy in Charlottesville the weekend prior–and, honestly, to help me process a great deal more than that; I’m sure you understand. I’ve written so much this past year, but I’ve let myself feel defeated and discouraged into not sharing the vast majority of it with anyone, even my closest loved ones. But that ends today.
AMERICA
I hate you,
I love you,
I want you
to die;
I need to march
forward, but
I cannot decide
on a battle-cry,
so all I can do
is buzz, unthinking
at the TV, wanting
to cry about how
all my favorite books
end with gunshots,
and about how often–
how
so very insanely
often–
I must watch you be raped,
beaten, shot, and killed
by men who have admirers,
legions of fans on screens
who insist that it was your fault,
that they cannot be met
with justice because
they have a bright
white future
and answering for this
particular murder
would certainly delay the good-time,
their destiny
manifested
on stolen blood and soil.
I’m supposed to understand
and be better,
but I can’t even be good
if this is a war;
and my love cannot touch
the men who don’t read,
because their god hasn’t written
anything in millennia,
and so they wander,
boredly, lost,
deeper
into eucharistic bloodlusts,
celebrating the arrival of their
long-awaited White Jesus,
who boasts a fake, orange tan
because he’s so quietly ashamed of
His American Whiteness
but doesn’t bother to wonder why,
so neither do his followers;
but I’m supposed to understand
as they march into my bedroom,
wild-eyed, carrying torches
and weapons,
shouting “JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!”
while looking pathetically replaceable,
all of them nearly identical:
colorless,
marching in-step with one another,
screaming the same bland hatred,
trying so desperately hard
to look just as tough as
the man in front of them,
howling, stampeding
toward incredible nothing,
“borne back
ceaselessly
into the past,”*
toward slaves and genocides and
inbred children,
malformed by ignorance and vanity,
with dead or quiet mothers
and no lust for knowledge
or protection from diseases
and the sun,
just a tired, grumpy god
watching
as daughters get raped by sons
and are told to shut up and
get daddy a beer because
he works so hard and just wants
to groan like the man on TV
about how things need to change
so he can feel like he’s part of
something bigger than
himself.
*The famous last phrase of The Great Gatsby
Love always,
Mister L.
Lonely Hearts Chapel 