America, you are a patchwork.

Yet, you’ve tried so hard to forget what you’re made of.

Built on the bones of oppression and the backs of servitude

You began with audacious claims –

Equality

Liberty

Happiness as a pursuit

Living up to these has been a grasp

And a miss

A step forward

A freefall back

What is America?

She’s been called many refrains

She welcomed yet erased

A beacon of hope

A place of such misery

America, picking the pockets of the poor to line those of the vilest hoards.

She made a social contract,

But kept changing the language,

And who could sign.

America is

A mirage, not a dream

A charade, not a promise

America is war and secret ops and

Also, very much a gun

Rebellions, succession, a North and a South

She has always been in angst, trying to blame, cover, shame.

The country, built on no god or king

Keeps letting the lords and the elites weigh its scales of justice

She’s been to the brim with hate

Because the melting pot refused to mesh

She asserted herself on the world like an inpatient lad,

Sometimes for good, but more often for not

The golden age, the great era, was before equality came

These were decadent times for the white men who have always had the lead.

She’s made so many fight for the chance to simply exist.

There have always been

Two of you

Two faces

A heart and a rot

A Janus plunged in duality, beginnings and gates

An assaulting contradiction whose true identity is not the story she likes to sell.

America, a land stolen, never discovered

The founders took it, and although they declared their independence from tyranny, did create some of their own.

It’s not un-American to point out the flaws; it’s wholly patriotic to do so.

America is broken.

America is shackled.

America is no home for the many.

This is not who we are? But isn’t it? Rinse away the whitewashing and propaganda, and what’s left?

As the words from the constitution fade into the machine of hate and cast out evident freedoms –

The question becomes, when do we, the people, all the people, reject this purgatory of injustice and inequality?

America is greed over humanity.

Will it always be?

Scrape away the apathy, eyes wide, and believe we are no longer the resistance, we are the rebellion.

Rage, rage, Thomas said, against the dying of the light that cast such a closing shadow.

America is in the moment of her final fight.