bloom

America, You were my first love affair.

Do you not hear your infants,
crying? The voices, clamoring not for a single thing
but clamoring? Everywhere, flooding the streets with our
ideals, night lamps for midnight postman? Have you forgotten
your orphans? Chained in desolate row houses, still believing
in your dreams.

Brick by brick, history stands mystified by it's irrelevance. This rare place of flooding mounts, chained by your history. Our walls are fragile, does our house
lack a foundation? our ill fed thoughts, congesting the hallways, lingering cigarette smoke, the carcasses swept into drains at dawn unnoticed.

Where is your Buffalo now? The twisted steel of forgotten ports lingering where no ship docks, stolen promises collapsing in unused factories. Why did you discard us?

I read your discarded postcards, phantom images, what is left
other than our imagined selves. Do you hear us? weeping through your streets, phantoms lingering in your walls.
Are we ill advised foreigners? Is this our vigil? Have you laid a rosary over our stones, have we bent in the willows, flooded the cemetery, where is the night
watchman? Have your loco-motives halted, your mines collapsed, has the passage from east to west ceased? Where are your majestic ships? Do you hear the sweeping chorus of the strange fruit planted in your cotton fields? Your wind carried us, do you see? Have we yet to become the flesh of your soil? Does the odor still linger or did it dissipate? Have we really become ill advised foreigners?