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  • America
  • Tony Hoagland (bio)

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue studSays that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodesWhere you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over themLike a boiling Jacuzzi full of ball-peen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the foldsOf the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar billsSpilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped "Thank god—those Ben Franklins wereClogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dadWould never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothesAnd I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined one hundred channels of twenty-four-hour cableOr what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past youAnd you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath youAnd you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own handWhich turns the volume higher?

reprinted from What Narcissism Means to Me, Graywolf Press (2003) [End Page 105]

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston. His latest book of poems is Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, and he can be reached at thglnd@aol.com.

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