You see that Shining City on The Hill?
The shame is that the shine is just
The gleaming of the oily sheen
On the rats’ backs swarming from its slums,
The shimmer of the stacks of trash,
The glister of the stolen gold
Reflected in the pools of blood,
The glistening of the sweat of slaves,
The sparkle of the film star’s teeth,
The Milky Way of motes of stirred up dust
Twinkling in the beams that play around
The shadows as they tic across the cave,
The flicker in the polished dreams
Of Freedom, just a fresher theft
To free the thief to thieve, and thieve
Others’ freedoms too, self-evidenced
By genocide and force transhumance
In a bolthole built for grifters
By bigots who sought havens for their hatreds,
And newly peopled by great waves of deadbeats
Who couldn’t hack it in the Hapsburg Empire,
And dedicated to the proposition of straight teeth
For eating smaller dogs
While bombing and bamboozling the world
Into seeing it as advertised:
The Shining City on The Hill.
Though you know, don’t you, that the shining’s
Mostly just our shared sun (the patent’s pending)
Setting through the smog,
Right?