lines composed below the povertey line

I've lived around here
my whole adult life

From my youth,
I'm familiar with exclusive resorts,
fancy restaurants,
and piano lessons and filet mignon

From college,
I'm familiar with student art shows
with top-shelf open bars
and unlimited platters of hors d'eurves:
asparagus and chocolate-coated strawberries,
sushi, crackers, and cheese/spinach dips,
etc.,
familiar with plush and quiet university libraries,
with all manners of professors
and intellectual discussion
ranging from brilliant to inane,
quite familiar with the fine arts,
philosophy, and literature

And it's partly due to the latter two
to which I've been long devoted,
that I am also familiar
with dollar stores and food-banks,
with the art of the vagabond camp,
with psychiatric institutions,
methodical society-wide ostracism,
the dangers of being a disposable pedestrian
in an anarchic drivers' society,
familiar even with outright hunger

In the U.S.A. of 2010,
philosophy and literature are personas-non-grata
(though intellectual pretention
and best-selling crimes against literature
are quite in vogue,)
and the masses are convinced we have
a free press and freedom of thought and religion...
and we sort of do
for those willing to be stalked by the government
(which secretly and legally eavesdrops on communications as they desire,)
to be villified by the corporate press,
and risk being shot by one of the hundreds of millions of guns
that pack our country...
with less than stellar assurance
that the murderer will be punished
by the brain-washed jurors who probably share
his sentiments and his hatred.
Similarly, the muslims are perfectly free to legally
build a cultural center on private property in Manhattan:
a fine example of what a free society we are.

From all this,
I can draw no absolute conclusions;
As a lunatic vagabond
(if for now situated more comfortably,)
it's not my job anyway.
And the authorities are brilliant people,
are running things well,
and everything is under control.

!?RIGHT?!