MYTHONOLITH

I believe America is a nation of ghosts,

of make and memory, with

entrenched wounding, longing, and sadness.

We're taught of our great promise,

we're beaten over the head from birth with it,

then one day we look around and ask:

Is this it?

Have we settled?

Have we been trapped?

And by whom?

We’re the ones who keep ourselves trapped.

And, of course, all the damaged souls of the many dead,

killed at home or abroad,

for this single idea.

A monomyth

of future possibility,

one we can never reach,

Salesmen widen the canyons of want scratched in our hearts of thorn and turquoise,

they cut them open like mile-long floods of glacial melt.

a paradisical ideal of paradoxical promise that tells us to take it all

even as it proudly proclaims that the borders of possibility are infinite.

John Wayne squats in the dirt and gives a rattler the snakeye,

plugs the canyon-red whoop whoop pit of an injun with his hot lead,

and strides into cactus fields that flow with the hot sugars of the future.

He plucks the feathers of a vulture,

and sticks them in ring around his scalp,

and blinks out the blood-drips as he straddles mountains

and hums "Hail to the Chief" as casts his snakeye on the setting sun

and dares it to let itself

sink

another

god

damn

inch.