How I hated you then
Flinging flag to the floor
“Nazi swastika propaganda hell!”
If one lived in Latin America
In the 1980s
The stupid, the ignorant
Celebrating your birth
And forgetting that it was in fact
A revolution
Get rich, live ignorantly, eat yourself to death
As the television takes the rest of your time
Yet why?
Back breaking work in the warehouse
After which a bag of potato chips
And a Coca-Cola were the food of the gods
Hot dogs and tortillas with refried beans
Were good enough for dinner
And on very special occasions
A Big Mac
I took that dollar mom gave us and bought myself
A soda and candy bar for lunch
I didn’t have the heart to tell her school lunch costs more
And I worked cleaning tables after lunch to earn a hot-cooked meal
On days when I was painfully hungry
Unintentionally embarrassing my older sister
By so blatantly revealing our lack of money, with my silly industriousness
An industriousness that you taught me
And I hated you then
America
I was taught to chase the dream, your dream
But I did it in my own style
Inevitably failing America
Inevitably failing at middle-classness
When faced with the real thing
Knowing nothing about wine drinking
Visits to the theatre
Or holiday homes
My white trash heritage could never be concealed
And part of me was proud of that
America
I saw your children suffering
Blunt force trauma
Guts spewed across Manhattan sidewalks
Horrific images seared, orange fireball, dust, fall
Tangling, metal screeching, burning flesh death
I hated you for letting it happen
America
With your bullshit cockiness that I never believed
But never imagined was such a facade
I hated you for your violent, petulant response
When I wanted so much grace in grief, so much spirit of your best city
How you failed
And still I hated you
Suddenly a foreigner
And how they despise you America
But not like I do
They despise you for the most ridiculous of things
While consuming your music, your food and your
Non-culture
They call me an idiot and a fool America
Because of you
And I resent you for it
But I begin to miss you
America
I begin to understand you more from afar
I begin to hear the beatings of your soul
In a rally in Wisconsin
In a Seattle abortion clinic
In my never successful attempts to explain
Why those stereotypes about you are wrong
No matter how much I despised you myself
And a strange feeling grows
That of longing
That of desire
That of home
And I still despise your worst aspects America
But I fight against them with the love of a patriot
Mourning the Wobblies still
Your aborted Labor Party
And this one was very late term
Though not late enough
For the most vociferous pro-lifer to object
And all that I am is touched in some way by that stunted soul
The heritage that is seldom celebrated
Save in a dusty Howard Zinn book
In the desire to create a better world
One that extends well beyond your borders America
In such a dialectical process
May I become your Shiva
Your simultaneous destroyer and creator
My hatred as ever encompassing my deep abiding love
