Behold your public funds at work:
Trash-strewn gutters, loitering thugs;
Sidewalk dancers start to twerk
While tattooed clowns deal circus drugs.
Social workers check the pulse
In clouds of menace: sick-sweet smoke.
The cities brain and guts convulse:
Mad laughter for an absent joke.
Such Godless faces, Christless souls
Whose gazes show malign defeat
Evoke dysfunction. On it rolls:
A harsh, reptilian urban beat.
The ghosts of absent fathers fade
In methadone . . . the guttural yells
Infect the urine-reeking shade
Of demons bound in welfare hells.
America—reduced to this.
Fragmented, begging for repair.
A vicious and unkind abyss
Beyond all hope and all despair.
I want to flee such streets of noise
Where fate is read in scraps of trash
When sirens urge the circus boys
To pocket their illicit cash.
The summer snow-flakes
rise gently in morning mist:
your desert is vast.
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