Pax Americana

We paid them with crumbled dollar bills and spent down pavements past marching bands and flags and storefronts and insects and riot cops and horse cops and firemen and policemen and gaymen and goat and sheep and cow and horse and horse cop and beggar and leper and addict and a fallen star, cooling in the car pool lane.

Intuiting the center of the Universe is close, we link arms and stomp and yell and demand grand masters hold blank canvasses to the sun and illuminate the heavenly bodies floating inside our eyes.

I offered a bee my hand to sting and it swells. I hold a blade of grass between my thumbs and blow, filling the Void with the sound of saxophone and tree branch and dead leaf and window and gas station and gas rag and milkshake and garden hose and burning house and cricket and brother and sister and whimsome nobody and my violent vicissitude. I break my cheekbones and hold a pistol to my chest and pretend to be a roman replica of a greek statue. I hold the mediterranean to its word.

We all hold out our palms for the bee to sting. We learn to play the typewriter in pastures and shoot toy cap guns at passing comets and hold mannequins for ransom and shock diabetic baboons to death. We scrape our teeth and wonder if it really is the year the history books say it is. We play russian roulette in my bedroom and hurt my baby seal and stare at pictures in the encyclopedia and look up all the words we don’t know.

As the ghost of Robert Johnson pours across the 35th parallel, our skulls bloom like tiny solariums and we begin to rethink the 2000s and the 1990s and the 1980s and the 1970s and the 1960s and the 1950s and the 1940s and the 1930s and the 1920s...

Etcetera, etcetera. Forever and Ever. Alleluia and Amen.