YAWP

Walt, under my bootsoles you smell like napthalene and paint
whenever the water table rises, and no one is held accountable.

Generalists with cell phones selling wellness products on the
beltways of America at eighty miles per hour believe

they are the first to ever want a life that’s more than labor and
have made that aspiration a creed. Their prayer: May I get mine.

Your beautiful roughs have been trained to kill a dozen ways,
contractors now, not camerados, and none can be heard

above the mating calls of money sounding in the air now
everywhere instead of the flocks of sparrows you heard in Camden.

Do I sound bitter? Very well then, I sound bitter. I am large.
I contain the entire betrayal of our country, Walt, its feudal lords

for whom democracy is an obstacle, for whom humans are
resources, a cost of doing business, regrettable expenditures,

and I’m not feeling especially amative, loafing here, my soul
so far declining my invitation, maybe because a camera in a tree

is beaming my image to a satellite tracked by a monitor
in a subterranean office somewhere deep in These United States.

— RH 8/2011