Civil Unrest

My gnawing frustrations and SWMS 210 have merged in a manifesto I am writing called:

A Statement for Civil Unrest Pt. 1

Milky Way dreams cling to your eyes.

You’ve mistaken barbed wire fences for free enterprise.

Social insecurity keeps the masses in line.

We are assembling the same industry to which we are confined.

Liberty was raped and covered in a Star-Spangled Banner.

We are pledging allegiance to her apprehenders.

Singing ourselves to death about the home of the free,

Makes one wonder if lab rats are this blindly happy.

A façade named equal opportunity moved into this town.

The White House was named after the race that burned her down.

Metaphors for freedom are sold between slices of chlorinated bread;

While patent-pending crops and visions of high fructose sugar plums are dancing in our heads.

Hydrogenated allusions of health are keeping the conscientious quiet.

We occupied Wall Street but they occupy our mindset.

Glowing implications of normalcy scream at us through impenetrable screens.

Media is short for brainwashing democracy.

Girls were assigned the color of the body part they have been taught to shame,

While we paid a mouse billions to tell the same girls they can’t play with trains and airplanes.

Because if you piss sitting down that’s where you’re required to stay,

Until it’s time to bear another head of state.

Lions and tigers are fighting in Washington over who gets the most meat,

While the rancid smell of starvation is bleeding through our streets.

And little boys are playing with guns Congress put in their hands,

And the prisons built for them are keeping the system according to plan.

Tyranny is reproducing by mitosis on every FM station,

Replaying the American Dream in violent reiterations.

Because if everyone wakes up everyone just might fight back.

So pens emblazoned with pharmaceutical rhetoric are signing Lunesta Laws and prescriptions for Prozac.

Robin Hood was beaten by men in blue uniforms and thrown in jail.

The judge told him at the trial, “Wars don’t pay for themselves.”

His story is written on the backs of black diamonds in scar tissue Braille.

Freedom is the imaginary line between no apologies and Suburbia’s cracked jingle bells.

This country was born immature to forefathers and no mothers.

And labor pains in disquieted flames are still piercing one worker after another.