Greeting Card
by Ben Giamo
Welcome to Amerika —
You’re fired! furloughed!
Detained and deported!
Have a nice day . . .
And a pleasant tomorrow
In the shithole of your own making.
We give ours a gilded sheen
And to smother the smell
Of rank greenbacks
We’ve invested in cryptocurrency
To forestall the odor of entropy:
You can’t smell or riffle it,
Nor flip it through the goal post
Of your opponent’s fingers.
Mind you, digital loafing is verboten.
Don’t you know lilacs
In the dooryard bloom
Only for the citizens united
In fear and loathing.
“Cigars, cigarettes, tiparillos?”
“What’s the movie?”
“The Nation of No Return.”
Tired? Piss poor? Huddled up
En masse in your own mise-èn-scene?
Don’t even think about it!
No vacancies —
Nada
No more condos in the country
Only the vacuous can maintain.
Unless, unless . . .
You pay the big bucks, buckeroo.
In that case, if you got the jack
You’re free to come and go,
Pay your taxes, wave the flag
And reap what you do not sow.
Get patriotic —
Buy a Tesla or some real estate.
By the way, over here
There happens to be
A spangled tower for sale
Deep in the desert
And on federal land to boot
Right in the middle of Boomtown.
And wait there’s more:
In the bargain basement
A bridge suspended
Between two buttes.
Interested?
See my agent.
Smells a tad musky
But boy o boy o boy
Can he operate
Limb from limb,
Organ by organ
And when he’s done
Only a tangle of spent nerves
Remain tossed in a heap
Of the lost and found.
Ben Giamo is a professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of several books, including On the Bowery: Confronting Homelessness in American Society; Beyond Homelessness: Frames of Reference; The Homeless of Ironweed; Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester; Notes from the Bowery; and Homeless Come Home: An Advocate, the Riverbank, and Murder in Topeka, Kansas.