The American Ream

They kissed in cars sleek as flying saucers
above a night-time grid of small-town streets
laid out like landing lights.
Jenny’s mouth was pink with Bazooka Joe
and Johnny’s pocket full of baseball cards.
The radio played sh’boom
on saxophones instead of guitars,
while bug-eyed monsters from the Red Star
took their places beside backyard pools.
At school next morning, there were sirens
and Donna ducked under her desk.
Meanwhile, Donny smoked behind the bleachers
and posed in radiation-proof shades.
The soda jerk served them bathtub gin
that stripped the paint off their picket fence.
There was a ghost-wind where the redwoods fell
as Milly cried herself to sleep.
Billy had one hand in her petticoats
and the other slicked with axle grease.
From the corn rows and the cotton fields,
it was a long way as the crop-duster flies.
The only good president was a dead one,
when the dollar bills were Mickey Mouse.
Bobbie-Jo’s pappy was a hanging judge
and Jimmy-Bob burnt the court-house down.
They said that Tonto made a rug out of Rin-Tin-Tin
and Lassie pissed up Tarzan’s leg.
Jean gave blowjobs to angels
on the hillside beneath Hollywoodland
and Gene rode his horse down Broadway
singing yippie-yi-yo for the A.G.C.
No love came cheaper than a GI bride,
who dreamed of living in a Westinghouse;
of a honeymoon in Macy’s window.
With a war cry of ‘Remember the Ponderosa!’
her husband died on the minefield beaches of Malibu.
Barbie caught some rays on Bikini Atoll.
Barry bought a banjo and busked.
A million other roads without Hope or Dorothy
led to a version of the American ream:
more than fifty altered states,
in which tired and addled asses wore sheriff’s badges.
It was way too late for Bonnie,
who kept bullets like bees
and no fun for Bernie in his beatnik beret.
He got a good kicking on Route 666,
as the rockets of Interdependence Day
knocked down dominoes in North Korea.
Siegel and Shuster’s songbook of Superman,
with its psalms in praise of a post-Nietzsche Jesus,
who declared he was not then nor never
a Bible-bearing member of any club
that would have him as a member,
went unheard by women under hairdryers,
or above the whine of Hoovers chained to walls.
Sam became an aunt who mixed Martinis
and answered to ‘honey’, just as Sam
killed the last bald eagle and made
a novelty cigarette holder for his den.