Practice Makes

Hard-landing on the American continent,
the space craft from the Enlightenment
cracks along the United States.
A dreamed more perfect union,
glued together by ideals squirted out
from a Constitution tube and dried
between institutions, exhausted
within day-to-day struggles by 1970.

50 small nations surfaced
from sea to shining sea.
Topographers outlined in bold ink
and pixels for tourists, vagabonds, refugees.

When from the blue the sun enshrines
for each Homo sapiens potential, natures
may not run for life against a barbarian.
In the nose cone atop such a paradigm ship
the praxis human learns to fail better
as a steward loving the arts among stars.

Cultivate One’s Own Garden

During the now planetary
forever war on nature,
militarized curiosity
and the PR campaign, Innovation,
champion for comfort:
The enemy moves…until hammered.
Checkpoint Charlie guns down
everything dear in headlights.
An easy chair converts into a pocket,
corrupts into a coma,
collapses into a cemetery plot.

Drawn up centuries ago, battle lines
and corporate models close off
negotiating a live-and-let-live future.
Even sister Jill jacks into the genome
to beat the odds into submission.
If not a dog, cat, corn ear, or rose,
species suffer at the gamer-gamble on survival.
A billion refugees crowd into surrounding
nations to escape glacial fossil-fueled melting.
A billion lone bodies left behind.

Hong Kong gongs (08/24/19)
to roll from sleep and into the streets.
Home-sweet-home regime change
reverberates around the world.

Under Lucky Stars

Freedom dispenses from a prescribed eyedropper.
Belonging comes in over-the-counter nose spray,
Guantanamo Bay. Aah.
The American clutches myth between the eyes
while dashing among pharmacies.

Under U.S. government surveillance,
manufacturers crank out dabs and doses
to refresh illusion on the streets
and in homes, even late at night.

Non-consumers with issues
must cough up a tissue fee,
the squeeze to catch a sneeze and wheeze.

The CCTV camera, smartphone GPS,
credit card purchase digital records
nick at close shave stories
almost causing bleeding.

The complaint that an alien moved in next door
went nowhere, as illegal as the lifestyle proved.

The application form incriminated in detail
the job candidate and potential crime to come.

At the penitentiary where debt enslaves
to guarantee labor, when salary stops
and bills pile, lifeless bodies go up in smoke.