Meditation 52

7 May 2020

America, I wake up wanting to vomit you from my gut.
America, I can no longer watch your snuff videos of black men shot on the street for being.
America, I recoil against you seven times a day, at the least.
America, I know the difference between contradictory assertions, nestled inside the cage of a single sentence.
America, if I were Moses, I’d find a body of water to divide and get the hell out of here.
America, the Pacific Ocean is too big; it’s more than body, it’s transcendent mass.
America, if I cannot part the waters, what part shall I take?
America, I abhor your children in cages, your citizens who want their hair cut, the pedicures an immigrant performs on you.
America, I hate your con jobs, your scams, your gas-lighting, your revisions of history, your attention to category.
America, I detest your gap between ordinary kindness and mass cruelty.
America, I hate your anger, and mine.
America, you are an instagram poet; your words look good, but I can only read them once before they melt.
America, you turn wine into brown water.
America, I hate the lead in your water, the lead in your children’s mouths, the way you make the new dog flinch as if you’re angry at him.
America, I hate the way you moralize work, then demand others die from it so you can eat your motherfucking steaks.
America, you Moloch me, and him and her and us and them and all the pronouns that cannot put us together again.
America, I hate your love of guns, your love of spittle, your love of flags, of that fragile cloth that no longer binds wounds.
America, I hate that your cloth flags do not cover our mouths and noses.
America, I hate that you cause us to confuse the carrier with the carried, the pipe with the bomb.
America, I hate that you have volition and cannot turn away from your television realities, the petty jealousies that animate us.
America, I hate that I hate, that I can't think beyond a narrow wall of sound as it pushes us away from one another.
America, I hate that I must change the geometry of my walk to avoid my neighbors.
America, I hate that I think I know the truth, or at least some facts.
America, forgive us our trespasses, because we are dead set on owning property, mistranslated as propriety.
America, I hate the revolution, because I know what comes after.
America, I hate the lack of revolution, because I know what’s happening now.
America, you will give us more suffering, and more, until we get the DT’s or the TD’s, until we cannot live inside our skins but exit into the ice to rip them off.
America, I hate the suburban pools, the pools of blood, the spools of the film that keeps repeating itself.
America, I saw the photograph of a man at a store wearing a KKK hood against the virus.
America, I saw a man shuffling down Kahekili in his slippers, gray hair matted, clothes unwashed, eyes to the sidewalk, construction trucks speeding to the north.
America, the malls are opening, the lines are forming.
America, I invite you to feed me, to cut my hair, to do my nails, and to tattoo my
   back with a flag.
America.