A Reprimand to Paranoid America

We are the fading ones, our promise is forfeit,
Our children are slaves of their parents devise.
America wants free range birds but not free range kids,
Our poultry will breathe air from the land of the free
But our future generations can breathe nothing but video games and T.V.
That act like a leash to the in-door demise,
A catapult to the obese fears that let our chickens free.

How can we live in this place where chickens are free
Before all human life is secured?
Jefferson wrote of men, not how chickens should live.
But when paranoia is free, no one else can be free -
We're afraid of our streets and the drug addled night,
Mistaking the moon for a voyeur thief
(We'd turn it in if we only knew how)
The news spins our stories, everyone is a crook
And they are out to get you - yes you! Not him next to you - You!
Every school has a shooter, every bar has a rapist,
Every playground a pedophile, every town a racist.
They're out there, its true but there's no army yet
And no precaution can dissuade the lone wolf from the hunt.

No seatbelt can save you and no pill will redeem you,
We face the casm with no parachute.
Its a tough road to swallow, it'll make your mouth dry,
Safe is as safe does but safe doesn't mean live.

We deny the outside like Judas did to Christ.
We love freedom but fear it like Jack said we did.
We measure a man by his faults, not by his loves,
And we refuse the holes and idiosyncrasies in his heart
But accept our own as our best excuse.

I try and laugh each day, but I weep in the night
For our hypocrisy and the children locked away in the dark
Who never wrote a letter to try and find their own hand,
Who have no friends save the facebook menagerie,
Who's hair has never been messy or felt the wind on a bike,
Who don't question their teachers or stay long after school,
Who have never walked alone through night-time lonesome,
Who save themselves for marriage by refusing young love,
Who bore too easily in the face of all things,
Who see all drunks as alcoholics and smokers as disease,
Who fear what their parents fear and never decide for themselves,
Who hate what their parents hate and for shame they continue,
Who see math as a punishment, not the poetry of the cosmos,
Who think they are different when different is a plague
And later become punished for being all too the same,
Who can never breathe easy outside, alone
For them and for us (for we are them) I weep strong.

America, I hate to tell you but you are planting your end
When you harvest bloggers who complain more than think,
Those who speak to the internet, by the internet, for the internet,
Never believing that more information could breed the ignorance we abhor.
Democracy is good but not in the extreme.
When all voices speak just gong-clamour sounds,
Obscuring the words that might come from God
Or his subsidiaries, whoever they may be.

We are not connected to the pulse-jazz-electric -
That mythical mystery that makes things profound,
The unifying love underlying our days,
The love to keep moving out, out, out, out, towards the moon.
NASA was once our newfound Jesus Christ,
Walking on water all the way to space,
Opening our dreams into realization's core.
Nothing can impress us that way anymore.
We've crucified NASA and given in to irony
Because its simpler and meaner than being sincere.

No more miracles rezone our tight imaginations;
The trends air to homogenization,
Because it seems the more we know,
The more we stay put,
Afraid of the too many lurking harms to bear witness
To life and we suffer for it in ways unexpected -
With weight gain and hair loss and the lost, wasted years;
A longer life but one worth the extension?

I am scared of the internet and the people we're becoming,
Every word can be a bullet while every man becomes a pawn.
Each nightmare becomes a nexus of possibility and thats insane.
We know harm will befall us but we think we can control it if we try
And we do try by shutting down, closing off, signing in,
Sealing our customized catacombs for inner-life stagnation.

To summarize for children:

America you are chicken for letting your chickens free
That we might eat healthier animals in our diet
While we keep ourselves couped up in our homes
In a stasis where the only option is to get fat.

Children, no matter your age - 5,7,10,15,22,45,90 -
Live, Live, Live, Live, Live, Live, Live, Live
With as little fear as you can,
Then eat those chickens to your heart's content.

To summarize for America:

We drink bottled water, we refuse the tap.
We like the bottle to say its from a mountain spring,
But when allowed to drink from a spring in the mountain
We decline - we've brought bottles, they have less germs,
Or anthrax, or viruses, or pollution, or fear or whatever...

America you refuse the source and deny the soul!
I hate you for fear mongering us into control.
We are not rapists, child mollesting whores,
We are not drug dealing, pot smoking, pedophile bores,
We are not kidnapping, killer, porno-racist uptights
Who thrive only under neon red lights!

We are good people, for the most part its true,
Imperfect but good; forgive us criminals too.
The demons we fear are present but few,
America, we are lakes of fresh water and biology and life
But you treat us like bottles
And so we treat ourselves much the same.

07/09