This land is your land.
This land is my land,
the home of the brave
and the land of cotton
and the world’s largest supplier
of tupperware containers and accessories
(So take that France).

This land is drug stores
crammed side-by-side
and gravel driveways leading
to white picket fence paradise
and all best possible results
taken out of context.

This land is small towns
with 4 churches and 5 topless bars
and a Wal-Mart that towers over them all
like some soaring, Olympian monument
to great selection and low, low prices.

This land is skin-changing Corporations
that live forever like vampires,
drinking and shitting in the same reservoir
of our blood and sweat and tears,
of light beer and gasoline
and castor oil and sweet tea
(‘cause hey, we don’t need to know
where it came from:
is that a thumbnail-
now don’t make a scene hon…).

This is a land that can put 41 bullets
into the body of a black man
reaching for his wallet
but cannot spare one
for a man who sends our sons and daughters
to the edge of an ocean of despair
for the pleasure of liberating someone else’s sandbox
and making the world safer for the Democracy of Exxon Mobil
(we call this political economy:
apparently a model well worth dying for).

This is a land of pyramid schemes
and pipe-bomb dreams
of chop-block Chevies
and bellies bursting seams,
where every press-conference is a carnival
and the men in suits are clowns
who swallow fire and speak in tongues
to drown out the screaming, squishing sounds.

This land, my friend, is drinking long-necked beers
in bars with rowdy, boisterous strangers
and not having to tell anyone who your father was…
and how he worked for 40 years
in that same airless coffin,
that pillbox repository
for the detritus of middle management,
and how he swayed so gently
from that light fixture
where he took his stand against the madness of
good vibrations
that tear you apart from the inside
one delayed aspiration at a time-
until all that’s left is a pile of receipts
and a bric-a-brac smile
that cracks like cement
under the cold glare of
street lights.

This land is full of rocks to bend the plow
This land is full of soil to hide the dead
This land is full of choruses to warn the hero
That just as his time has come,
So will it go again.

This land is your land, my friend,
and you can have it.

(for b. benston)

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