My Town

(The following piece is by an artist called Buddy Wakefield. I highly recommend his work, especially if you like performance poetry. Check him out on Youtube or go to http://www.buddywakefield.com/)

My town is cute
like a bumper sticker
like when Christians sport POWER OF PRIDE bumper stickers.
What is it you people don’t understand about pride being a deadly sin?

My town is cute like GOD BLESS AMERICA bumper stickers.
Judging by our excessive luxuries, those stickers really work.
Now if we can just get God to bless the whole world.

Alix Olsen’s bumper sticker reads I LOVE MY COUNTRY.
I JUST THINK WE SHOULD START SEEING OTHER PEOPLE.
But my town doesn’t see other people.
We’re just too cute
like the difference between what we say and what we do
like the fact that violence in any form
is sanctioned by the government as criminal or insane
unless they're the ones who commit it.

My town is cute like people who still shop at Wal-Mart and claim to be patriotic.
Stop it.

My town is cute in the way we worry about the gays
fuckin’ up our family values and the sanctity of marriage,
yet we still let our children watch television shows like Wife Swap, The Bachelor, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, American Idolatry
and Fox News.

My town is so cute that - check this out -
once, six years ago,
there were some brown people (boogity boogity),
they attacked two of our tallest buildings
and killed a shitload of our innocent citizens,
kinda like we did
in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador,
Tanzania, Mozambique, Vietnam, Afghanistan,
Hiroshima, Philippines, Kosovo, Bolivia,
Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Dresden,
Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Indonesia,
East Timor, Cambodia, Iraq, (what the fuck
are we doing in Israel?)
and my cute town pretends we never saw it [or had it] coming
so in a perpetual attempt to save cute face
we’ve waged a war on terror about as effective as the war on drugs.
My town is cute when we wage these wars in the name of God.

As many as 20% of the polar bears on the Northern Ice Cap are hermaphrodites
due to PCB’s being dumped into the ocean.
You won't hear about that shit on the news because it's too cute,
like a wolf giving birth through its penile canal (True).

My town is cute like a 300lb tumor containing hair and teeth inside of it
grown from the body of a 210 pound agoraphobic woman,
cute like competitive poetry, the history of Scientology, plastic surgery,
and refined sugars, cute
like a man swallowing an 8-ball of cocaine
then jumping from a 5-story building to escape police,
getting up and running away from it all.

Y'all, this
this is a true story:

The first time my town saw the sky
it sucker punched us in the throat
left us breathless
said, "I'm gonna keep you awake some nights
without touching you
you'll make it up, the pain,
you always do."

Now my town only buys drowsy formula sky.
Otherwise it gets too big, the sky,
like when we were three
before we realized:

We have balls.
The sky does not.
Therefore, we have bigger balls than the sky.

Please
do not talk to us about being tea-bagged
by upside down hot air balloons.

Where rational conversation and big pictures are concerned
we have no time for getting wrapped up.
We are not presents for your sky.
We are just right.
Far right.
And cut
like 3-year-olds,
like the book about bunny suicides,
cute like Old Yeller just 'fore he got shot in the rabies
(a good actor, that dog).

My town was born way off the mark.
Sometimes we see it coming, the mark,
So we shoot it with spit wads or
precision-guided phallic symbols.

Every time there is talk of war
people give me reasons why their town
will be bombed first.
It's a souped-up sense of self importance, buck-o.
Everybody knows my town will be bombed first
because once
we planned the construction of a nuclear power plant
right here in the same fields where our military children
now carry out covert orders to keep the word dumb alive.

Christianity has a hard time workin' here,
makes us believe that even when we are alone
someone is watching us and judging us.
Now we're all narcissists.
We have a habit of giving other people's gifts to ourselves.

But at least our children still get their confidence booster shots,
while our fathers perform voice reduction surgery
to keep our pleas for help mime-sized
while our mothers are bending infinity in half
so that our families can continue to talk in circles,
while we all burn our tongues when we drink hot cocoa
for the same reason everybody here wants to hug the ocean
because it's just so much.

My town knows that there is something so big inside of all of us
we have to suck
just to distract you from being directly overwhelmed by our real power,
the kind of power that makes you smile.
Everybody knows that smiling is for little girls, the gays
and certain kinds of fish
who are smiling by accident.

The shortcuts my town has taken
have saved us so little time
gotten us so far ahead of ourselves
we have actually fallen behind.
Would have been better off learning to herd turtles
into bomb shelters, on a moments notice,
giggling at the fact that we will all now die
and it'll have happened so fast
we will have never been anything
but really cute
like our three-year-olds
who use folding chairs
to beat lambs within inches of their lives.

My town is inches tall.
It's why the sky looks down on us,
wants to tell us something
like grow up
or reach up
or look up and watch me winking
I'm trying to talk to you.

The Earth is travelling at 66,641 mph around the sun.
It simultaneously rotates on itself at over 1000 mph.
My town? Yeah,
it's having some trouble sleeping.