The Herbicide Dilemma

 Imagine Monsanto had developed an herbicide (which, for all I know, they may have done) that was 100% effective in killing weeds but won't kill flowers or vegetables, as long as it is used properly. If misused it kills lots of things--grasses, trees and other vegetation, insects and animals, anything that gets in its way. It is a significant danger to microclimates and water supplies. And although it doesn't kill vegetables, it does poison them, so it can't be used on them or the food will become toxic to whatever eats it. Nonetheless, though powerful and deadly, it is safe to use in flower beds.

Should it be allowed on the market? 

Let's be clear, in case of deliberate misuse, accident, or negligence people will die, possibly a lot of people. If an unscrupulous gardener uses this on his tomatoes and sells them at a farmer's market, his customers will die. Not immediately of course. It may take a few years. Their deaths may be hard to trace to the bulging ripe tomatoes they bought at the farmers' market three years before. And in the case of accidental spillage or incorrect mixture, the ground water will be polluted, and people and animals will die and insects will die. The ground will become infertile--but just in patches and just for a while. 

Of course we can't guarantee everyone who buys this herbicide will use it properly. In fact we can guarantee that some won't. That's just how people are. Someone will spill it. Some will be tempted by the potential sale of ripe tomatoes. Some will neglect to read the directions thoroughly. If we market this product, people will die--that's a guarantee. There will be little pockets of corpses in various places where the product was misused. 

Let's add to the mix that nobody needs this product. It has its uses, but there are other ways to grow flowers. 

Should we ban the sale? Is it too dangerous? Or should we at least heavily regulate it to reduce the risk? Or should we just pop it on the shelves of Agway and Home Depot and your local garden center for anyone to buy at any time for any reason?

Now let's think about guns.

Just Verbing

I am going

to the store. I go

to the store nearly every Saturday. I went

to the store last Saturday even though I had gone

to the store on Friday; Sunday was

the day I would run out

of butter, so I went

again Saturday. I would have gone

on Sunday, but I had had

a headache the previous three Sundays and was

afraid that that would be

my new Sunday thing. I will go

again tomorrow, however, just to see. I will have gone

to the store before Church starts at eleven. This is

my story. I have been working

on it for ten minutes.  It is told.

I have spoken.

A Single Bird of Unknown Species

The blaze above black mountains
yellow, orange, hectic red
if it’s morning or if it’s evening
no one ever knew
 
such beauty wrapped
in so much sadness
until it hit them
there it was for everyone
yellow, orange, hectic red
the photographic aftermath
of a gargantuan explosion
bleeding above high mountains
ridgeblade black
 
who lacked insight to say
the sky is blue
the sky is the color of sky
morning, day, evening, night
the sky is drained of illusion
the cold and beautiful light revealed
morning and night and evening
and all the long and wakeful day
a single black-winged bird floats by
the sky is blue
or white
or grey

The Name Beneath the Title

 I will be 60 in 19 days.

I keep asking myself, am I learning yet?
A poem is what can be said in the space of a poem.
There is no difference between what is said
And how it is said. Every word change
Changes everything. But so does every reader every
Reading, even mine. Will I one day know what it was
I was exploring? I cannot control the poem.
This is what makes poetry like everything else: like life
Like growing old, like stars, like knowledge, like the structure of knowledge
That opens as it closes. Wisdom has a voice. And a space
Where there is no voice.
Any resting place is home.
Everybody needs a home.
A home does not need to be a place.
Everything is a prayer
If you want it to be, Father Martin.
When you look at the numbers you say ah!
When you look behind the numbers you say huh?
All religions were made by people to know the divine
And each for other reasons as well. And if they help
They help. And if they hurt, they hurt.
And they don’t always help. But they do always hurt.
That is how they are like everything else. Like poems and laws and tongues
And flame. You have to live with words. You have to live
Where no words are. If this is a poem
Great. And if this is not a poem
Also great.
 

Just a Dumb Old Mountain

and yet those big brains of science, Einstein, Hawking, Kepler, Etcetera,
staring not at stars but at numbers
numbers on paper,
pushing them around like peas on a plate
calculate
with astonishing precision

in unreal units that make it imaginable
the stars’ distance, the universe’s edge—just numbers
nothing real at all
and yet the levers, the imaginary levers,
that move actual planets. So with words
I pretend to penetrate the mystery of all that numbers cannot touch
as if the problem were not simply inattention, lack of investment, the protraction of desire.

Giving Your Love to Passing Things

What are you saving it for

if you can’t give it to the snow now
turning your backyard into a postcard,
or to the dog who can no longer negotiate
the stairs in either direction? She’s heavy
on your aging arms, a good sixty pounds,
she farts every time you pick her up,
squeezing her warm belly close to your chest
for easy lugging; the first time you did it
she squirmed like what the fuck are you up to?
I’m not one of those goddamn lapdogs,
I keep my four on the floor at all times, moron,
but now when it’s time for a meal and for bed
she comes looking for you, clicking her toenails
along the floor, leading you where you have to go.
She stands at attention like a soldier at the bottom of the stairs
or like someone who has already climbed into the cab
and announced her destination. Tomorrow she’ll ride
one last time to the veterinary clinic.
and you’ll sign forms and they’ll fill her veins
with sodium barbital and some frothy white shit
to stop your heart. She’ll collapse in your arms
with the same what the fuck expression she used
when you first picked her up. You’ll put her down.
Meanwhile at home the snow is falling everywhere
on the garden and the trees, on the house and on the cars,
on the crib where you keep the firewood, on the trailer,
and the wellhead, a frothy whiteness erasing
her footprints forever on the frozen grass.

The Sky Tonight

It’s a water balloon you squeeze
It’s coloring outside of the lines
It’s the assurance of music
The push to prove
The rules won’t hold.
 
Like anything.
 
It’s the cold hard empty fact
Against the made-up musts
That soften, enflame, and fill it.
 
It’s the vacuum of the isolated word
It’s the lack of the vacuum.
It’s holding on. It’s letting go
In awesome, awful, autumn wonder.
It’s the coloring of leaves
The lingering lightning’s
Silent thunder.

 

What Dreams Don't Know

 That the goal of life from life's point of view 

is to get everyone on earth to envy you.

That the problem of evil is overcome

when you realize the need of compassion. 

The volumes that need to be written on this title and these verses bring to mind St. John of the Cross, whose only volume (as far as I know), The Ascent of Mount Carmel, includes The Dark Night of the Soul, which is a gloss on a poem of his own composition, which then serves as a mnemonic for the exegesis. The formula is brilliant. Why is it not used more often? 

I doubt the day will ever come when I can put down the reflections that created these or the development that comes from these--with all their hedges and qualifications. But just a couple notes then: Freud was not the first to posit that dreams know more about us than wakefulness, that the unconscious is truer than the conscious mind. It's like believing that children and animals are closer to God than nuns and priests or any adult however devout. But as the other verse says,

I am not who I am

when I am naked

unless I am naked

right now

and I'm not. 

Moments are layers of the past and trajectories for the future piled on the now. But there is only now. If the past exists, it exists now. If love exists, it exists now, in actual acts of feelings being expressed. Do I love you when you are not in my thoughts? Do I see you when my eyes are closed? Or is my belief that I do just persistence of motion? If I sing "I will always love you and I always have loved you" I mean that at every opportunity, at every moment when it mattered I did, when it will be I pledge to (and yet I have failed and will fail). It doesn't cover the moment I'm charging down the field with all my concentration on getting getting the ball past the defender into the net, though the past and the pledge may figure in their way. 

For the first couplet, a short cut, Girard. But so much needs to be added.

For the second, the way around the first, because the goal of arousing universal envy is so obviously self-defeating it's laughable.  

The Golden Potty Mouth

                  A Limerepic

There once was a boy from Manhattan
With a gold-plated potty he shat in.
He’d poop out a tweet
And he’d tweet and re-tweet
Till America flushed and was gladdened.

Yes, I said of this boy from Manhattan
(With the gold-plated potty he shat in):
He pooped out a word,
The miserable turd,
And flushed himself out of Manhattan. 

And up wafted in Mar-Florid-A-Lago
This poop-stained, moronic farrago
This blustering victim
(His enemies kicked him)
Reeking of cheese and bravado. 

But Florida just didn't want him
They hired an airplane to taunt him
They tried to evict him
(His enemies kicked him)
So he hopped in his cart and went golfin'.

"Maybe I should to go Scotland" he thought
"In Scotland I could go golfin' a lot!
They'll love my commode
I will poop till I'm old."
But in Scotland they said "you can rot."

By then the sun had arisen.
For some reason the boy thought of prison.
"Oh, where can I go
With my golden commode
Somewhere democracy isn't?"

Then he thought of his lover named Kim.
But Kim had had all of him
He ever would want
In a posh restaurant
Over Big Macs and Kimchi and gin. 

"Of course" he said, farting, "there's Putin.
Putin has always for me been a-rooting.
My lips I'll repair
To that warm derriere.
My potty and I 
Will find a home there.
And they said I was wrong to love Putin!"

There came from Manhattan a chump.

And the name of the chump was Trump.
He was so full shit
that to get rid of it
On America Trump took a dump.

Georgios Was onto Something

 

The three propositions of Georgios:

·         Nothing exists;

·         if anything exists, it cannot be known;

·         if it can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Georgios was onto something. But so was Plato.

Plato was onto something regarding form, but he was wrong to believe that forms exist, that they exist as forms and not merely as concepts.

But what was Georgios onto? 

Language is a tool analogous to the senses themselves as the cave is analogous to the world and the world to the forms. But there are no forms. They exist as concepts but have no extension in being, neither here nor there. There is no there. The senses are tools. The are not windows. We do not see the world itself. “The world itself” is a concept without extension in being. We see as. We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. If we had other tools we’d perceive other things or we’d perceive the same things differently. This is the fundamental point. We see because our eyes respond to light. And because they respond to light in the way that the respond to light. Other lenses would respond in other ways. There may be lenses that could hear light or taste or to things to light we cannot imagine. There are creatures to who not respond to light in anyway at all. They don’t know it “exists.” I’m not saying that light exists. I’m saying that from the perspective of a human something exists that manifests to the machinery of our bodies as light, usually accompanied by heat, though there are conceivable or rather it is conceivable that there are bodies for whom heat and light never coincide or coincide more intricately. We perceive heat with our skin, light with our eyes. Imagine an organ the perceives both, that runs away from the danger of heat when and only when their eyes hurt. Our sense organs construct a world for us to occupy.

Does objective reality exist? We have no way of knowing but also no reason to think it does as such. We can say that God sees the world as it really is. I don’t think God could make sense of that sentence. What does heat look like? What does green taste like? What is the sound of cabbage?

It doesn’t matter. We posit, rightly, properly, an objective world, a world that would still exist if we did not occupy it. We know there’s no such thing. Existence would still be if we were not part of it. But the world we posit as objective reality would not exist if we were not in. The objective world is what is available to all humans with intact senses and expressible to all humans with intact brains. It is the thing we posit that we can all agree upon. That rocks are hard. That the sun is hot. (I use any illustration with reserve.)

Our language uses our perceptions and our bodies to image a more complex reality than our senses alone would do. There is the world as our senses perceive it and as our reasoning minds construct it from sense data. But then there is language that forms what we take in and what we project into less certain versions or visions of the world. This is where it gets tricky. And it gets tricky because there are many more ways to configure the world this way and no final way.

We could say our desire is another sense. When we perceive via desire, we perceive beauty. We perceive beauty via the sense of desire. Fear is another desire. Fear sees danger. As our five other senses can deceive us with optical illusions and jalapenos, so our other senses, call them our emotional senses can deceive us.

Organized this way all that comes to us comes to our senses. And language helps us make sense of our senses. And beauty has the same existence as, red or b-flat. What Galileo called a secondary quality. But we don’t usually organize perceptions this way. We don’t have to. Reality exerts no pressure that requires our minds to think this way. Our minds are not water to gravity that has to follow a certain path down the mountain.

Language is a tool that posits the general, the ideal, the logos. A useful way to measure being. Justice doesn’t have to exist any more than “mile” has to exist for it to be a useful concept. And we can make reasonable arguments based on statistical analysis of who the greatest hitter was in the history of baseball even though the stats don’t measure from year to year or even day to day or moment to moment the same thing. (By the way, it was Babe Ruth.) The general does not exist. Every moment is unique and unrepeatable. But the ruler is helpful. It is necessary. It is good, if well used.

Jesus was perhaps the first to see this. Perhaps it was a pre-Socratic whom I’ve not read. The distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is everything. The spirit is understood as love. The spirit is open to the moment. Creeds and schools eternally in abeyance.

Which brings me back to Georgios. Georgios turns out to have been wrong that nothing exists but right that what exists cannot be known. But wrong to suggest that the fact that what exists cannot be known is of any consequence whatsoever. What exists can be known insofar as it impinges on the human machine, on its senses. A version of existence or being can be conceived. Scientific conclusions can be trusted to represent what we can call the objective correlative of human subjectivity. It can be trusted, it must be followed. Georgios was right that reality as such cannot be communicated. But the human experience of being as it impinges on use can be communicated. We can measure the length of a piece of string even though a piece of string has no absolute length. It has a length whenever we want to use it, in whatever situation we need for it to have a length.

The Second Iteration of When

When I look back to the start of this sentence
and see the word “when,” I marvel
at the confident, dare I say, urgent placement
of that time-bound adverb.
I wonder what the writer planned to say
about time, a subject I am deeply interested in.
But when I pass across and down and come
to the second iteration of that word,
the flaccid representation of When with “when”
I can’t help but be disappointed.
I feel betrayed, my hope of enlightenment gently crushed.
(Those dangling quotation marks, that limp shadow, lower case.)
I doubt the writer ever really had the brilliance
to support the cavalier thrust of that initial When.
I realize again how it’s always the way.
The woman or man impeccably dressed
strides in for the interview,
copies of relevant papers in a folder
held on the arm like a baby, ready
when need arises to pull focus from the un
expected hesitation or waver in the voice
at the unprepared-for question. And I realize,
again, with just a little less force
than I realized it the last time I realized it
that every time a new configuration
of existence walks into a room,
every possible response stands ready
to meet it. And every position will be filled.
Every classroom has its genius, its beauty and its bully.
Every poem is inherent in the language.
And I wonder at last again what I wondered at last before:
When will we ever get out of this fucking cave?

Two Road Diverged

Two roads diverged in a dusky wood
And I—I didn’t know what to do
So I looked down one as far as I could
Then I looked down the other,
And it branched too!
 
Aw, fuck it, I said. I’ll go this way.
And if I come back another time
Maybe I’ll go another way.
Though knowing me and my shitty mind
I’ll take the way I took today
 
And call it different. And so it’ll be.
And I’ll give myself some good advice.
No matter how familiar it feels,
You never take the same way twice.

Fall Haiku

 At this hour, this year,
midfall, the sun turns this one 
oak tree's brown leaves gold.

The Purpose of Writing

 The publisher, in refusing to accept my refusal to rewrite the book to fit his specifications, said: "I believe we have a disagreement over what the purpose of writing is." Had I replied, I would said this:

The purpose of writing (writing as a form of art) is to provide an experience. It is an experience that echoes but is not matched by any other experience. Being both emotional and intellectual in a way that no experience with "things" or "nature" can match, it provides room for reflection if not insight into life that only it can. 

If you have any other view of what writing is, you should trade it in for this one.  

What You Are Now

It’s like this: you aim the head of the maul
at the heart of the log and you drive it
straight over the center of your skull full force.
You don’t want to do this twice.

The maul head thunks against the chopping block.
But as for the piece of wood you were aiming at
it darts away like startled game. 
You hit it so close to the edge
you barely shaved a slice of bark,
a sliver of kindling.

Shit, you say, and shit, again, and fucking god.
You drop the maul and hoist the thing to strike again.
Shit, you say, and fucking god
with all these hundreds of logs 

and winter coming with its trainlike inertia, 

slow, relentless, and bound to arrive before all the wood is split 

and stacked 

and dry.
Shit you say and fucking god

damn this wood and these arms and these eyes
that have swung this heavy maul 10,000 times and still
can’t reliably hit the heart.
 
The more you miss and curse 

the more you miss and curse.

Nor can you recall when you need them the words 
that set your heart at ease just yesterday
when you were not splitting logs and the rain stayed away
when the honking geese drew your eyes everywhere 

until you found their dark chevron just where it should be

gliding south against the clouds, high as an airplane--
and the competent afternoon sun laid splotches of gold 
on the mums and the ever blooming zinnias and marigolds
and you harvested seeds in coffee cans.

That was a good day.
 
It’s not the coming of the winter or the fear of cold,
it’s the impulse to anger, 
it's some imperfectly traceable injury 
from years and years ago, you guess,
that you still can't lay a finger on,
that drives you to curse when you fail 
to master simple tasks. Something so long wired now
you can’t unwire it by any effort of will 
repetition of effort.
It’s just that.
 
You don’t have to be good
at everything. You don’t have to be
who you are now at every moment.
You will never master the art of swinging a maul.
You will never master the art of writing poems.
You may never be fit to love yourself so well you no longer curse
your failures. You may never know why. No one’s perfect. No one’s perfect.
No one’s perfect. You are what you are now.
Now you are what you are now.
Now you are what you are
now.

The Shift in Poetry

 Not infrequently when you plant a perennial precisely where you want it, it does not thrive. But it returns anyway, the next year, somewhere else. And blooms like a lunatic. The flower or the flowering bush knows where the good soil is and finds it. Poetry, we could say, produces a lot of green these days and very little bloom. Yes, more poets than ever are published, and more Ph.D.s are granted to study it than ever before. But no one reads but other poets and would-be poets and students who are forced by their eager or jaded or militant professors. Major publishers hardly publish any. Poets don't legislate from the shadows. How many people on the street would you have to ask to name five living poets before you could find anyone who could name one? And when you found that person would you recognize the name or have to look it up to confirm it?

We could say that poetry no longer thrives. 

Or we could say that despite our best horticultural efforts to keep poetry in its shaded plot, poetry is doing very well over there, behind our backs--or in our faces, disguised. But not really disguised. It's not trying to hide. We are trying not to see it. 

We still have too much of the Enlightenment in the rigid structure of our brains. Remember this  is the era that determined there must be only one proper way to spell a word. Everything has its proper definition and everything fits within its natural borders. If evolution has taught us anything, it is that we err when we take the measure of reality with the ruler of our individual lifespan. To a being of greater scope, a frog is a dinosaur, and a furry little scurrying paleolithic critter is as much a human being as an acorn is an oak tree. 

Enlightenment rigidity is a harmful and false way of thinking. And this is particularly so in regard to human phenomena--the stuff we, with our creative energies, think into being. A hydrogen atom is what it is. Granite too may be. Some things we don't get to understand outside of what they are. But poetry is not one of them. It exists, sure. The word in its most meaningful uses reaches out into something we did not create out of nothing. But it exists only for us, humans because it responds to something unique to us, even if it is (we hope) universal to our species. But to define it as the sum total of poems--of texts with some range of form and some access to aural figures and some set of line tropes--is to miss what matters most in poetry. Poetry is an experience created through language. And it doesn't matter where or how that experience is created. If poetry in the electronic and virtual world no longer thrives in the poem, it still thrives. (And I don't advocate giving up on the writing and reading of poems. And it wouldn't matter if I did. They will persist because they have adapted to the shade in which they grow.) Poetry thrives in song, certainly. It was always what mattered in song anyway. True, most songs are forgettable, either just bad or having their moment of sterile bloom. So are most poems. But Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize. Or if you think otherwise, that doesn't matter. There are songsters who do. And poetry shows up in novels and in film and on TV. And it's not just text. It exists in speech as well and sometimes requires it. It shows up in podcasts, and now and then on the news. Wordsworth was right that there is no essential difference between good poetry and good prose. Poetry exists wherever language creates experience through careful, deliberate, thoughtful, artistic rendering. It's not the experience of wanting to throw a brick at Donald Trump. At least I hope it's not. It is the experience of listening to Garrison Keillor tell a story. 

Hamlet as Actor

The key to Hamlet is drama, plays, playing. First there is the idea that “these are actions that a man might play, but I have in my that which passes show.” He’s not telling the truth. He’s saying what he wants to convince himself and others is true. He’s trying to be, in Girardian terms, the model for others. But they won’t follow him. They’ve moved on past grief, too quickly in the case of Gertrude, but other desires were stronger. Shakespeare isn’t interested in what these are. He gives too little information to us on how to understand them. Etc. The point is that Hamlet brings up acting for the first time in this speech, and tries to raise and sustain the idea that there is a difference between acting and genuine action, a difference which always has to be asserted because it can never be sustained, not because action can reproduce anything that the genuine can (Shakespeare again and again, in Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like it, and Much Ado etc. has a player detail how you can tell the difference between acting and real life but, an actor doing this on a stage always belies the claim, turns it into a joke in fact, or an instance of irony—in acting you can’t x, said to the actor who has just x’d) but because there is no such thing as an unacted genuine, or if there is, it is a momentary impulse that dies unless acted—such is the impulse to revenge when it first arises. If anything is genuine it is that moment when Hamlet pledges to carry out as swift as thoughts of love is revenge, which there is literally nothing to stop him from doing at that moment. He knows where the king is. He has been full and immediate access to the king, who is drunk and unable to defend himself. Shakespeare makes the situation easy as can be for revenge. It practically takes care of itself. But instead of strutting down to the hall where the inebriate king is stumbling around, Hamlet pledges to pretend to madness. A completely unmotivated action.

Why? He’s again acting. This is what we do in plays. Hamlet has seen The Spanish Tragedy and all the Revenge Tragedies ever performed. And he knows that to delay he has to pretend to be mad. Why? He could kill Claudius. And Shakespeare has taken away the one thing that could have made him hesitate—concern for his own safety. Shakespeare has made it clear that Hamlet’s suicidal desire is real, his carelessness for his own life is illustrated by his willingness to approach the ghost (quote the line). In fact one of the few times in the play when he’s eager to act is when he approaches the ghost. Why? The ghost may give him reason to live, or to act, or to distract himself from suicide. And he doesn’t want to kill Claudius because killing Claudius takes away his reason to live. If he lives to kill Claudius then he doesn’t have to die. He also in a more profound way doesn’t want to kill Claudius because if life itself isn’t worth anything, then revenge can’t be justified. Claudius took from his father something that was not valuable: his life. As long as earth is an unweeded garden, a rank prison, as long as the only reason not to kill yourself is fear of what comes next, then there’s no point in revenge. I can’t go with Nietzsche here in his reasoning, but his conclusion is sound.

A New Thought on Hamlet's Most Famous Soliloquy

This'll probably only work once, but, hey:

Think of it as the type of Shakespeare's early-days soliloquy: Direct talking to the audience, and not one of his later-days ones: Audience overhears character talking to himself. Or rather, think of it as a hybrid, direct address to the audience AS character thinks things through.

Hamlet comes on stage, solus, (yes, Claude and Polly are hiding). He paces, thinking. Everyone knows what's coming. But he stays silent until things feel really awkward, like Michael Jackson at the Superbowl. Then he turns to the audience, looks directly around the room for as long as anyone can stand it and he says, "to be." And the house lights come on full. Light explodes everywhere, and (timing here is important) the lights stay bright just long enough for the average member to start to have a glimmer of what's going on, and he says, lights going dark at "or," "or not to be."

And the brightness of the lights before make this darkness as dark as can be.

Hamlet goes on in an explanatory way. He hasn't noticed the lights going up or down. "That is the question" (i.e. "that this play is asking"). People's eyes adjust. Hamlet is in no hurry to get through this speech. Just as the eyes start to see the outline of Hamlet/actor, the stage lights start to come up, but so slowly that no one can tell whether that is what is happening or whether their eyes are continuing to adjust.

He goes through the rest of the speech as though he's explaining the play to the audience. But the meaning is occuring to him at the same time. Or at least the illustrations and examples are occurring to him in real time.

He melts back into the play at the sight of Ophelia.

NB: This also helps us over the "bourne" problem. In the play he seems to have forgotten that he's seen a ghost. But in this performance, he's letting you know that that is a play, and this is real life.

Red, White or Blue

(draft)

(capo second fret: A D F#m E7 C#m Bm A shapes, quick strum, upbeat)

B                       E 

Why are you afraid today?

              G#m            F#7

You’re gonna die anyway

       D#m                            C#m

Or is the world trying to make

     E              B

A victim of you?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care of you’re

Red or you’re white

It makes me blue

To see my brothers and

Sisters of color are

Suffering at the hands of

Systemic abuse

Black man in the street

He just wants some peace

Cop comes up and says

What do you do?

I’m just walking here

Isn’t that pretty clear

Haven’t you anything

Better to do?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Brown or your black

But maybe we do.

Cop says he’s had enough

Puts the man into cuffs

Says "I gotta make

An example of you.”

On the news it said
That young man is dead
People in the streets yell
"What did he do?"

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Rich or you’re poor

Red, purple or blue.

You said we're weak:

Peaceful riots in the street

The presidential Orangeman

Threatening you.

“If you don’t go away

I knee to the ground I say

I bring the army in for

Smothering you.”

You may be surprised to know

That’s not how it goes.

Americans everywhere

Coming for you.

Red, white, black and brown

Driving you outta town

It really isn’t hard to see

The failure of you.

All A-merica

Sees just what you are.

It's time you start to think of
Something better to do.

We Talked

We talked and talked and talked
Until Darrel Danger got it right.
So we set that account aside
And kept on talking.