America — By Allen Ginsberg (2017 Remix)

America, I’m giving you all and I’m still nothing.
America — $22,700 dollars in college debt, January 17th twenty-seventeen.
I’m told not to share my own mind.
America, are you ever going to stop picking fights?
Go fuck yourself with your stupid wall.
Text me, I’m too busy right now.
America, when will you listen to those voicemail messages?
When will you lay with me for just one night?
When will you be worthy of your million stars and moons?
America why are your news publications full of lies?
When can we stop making the malnourished fashionable?
I’m sick of your insane dream.
When will you look at me and swipe right?
America, after all, it is you and I who are beautiful not the next profile.
Your future isn’t what I thought it would be.
You made me want to believe.
There must be something we can agree on.
Jenna’s in Chicago I don’t think she’ll ever come back, it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister? Or will this become some stupid meme?
Keep waiting in line, your number will be called.
I refuse to give up my passions.
America, I’ve told you and my parents:
“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
America, the ice caps are melting!
I haven’t watched the news for months,
Everyday another promise goes unfulfilled.
America, I feel empathetic for Black Lives Matter.
America, I used to dream of moving away from you when I was a kid,
And I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I lay in bed for days on end and hope I’ll wake up feeling better.
Whenever I go out I get drunk but feel more alone.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me sitting during the national anthem.
My best friend thinks my ideas are perfectly right.
I don’t trust in your god.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you how you treated cousin Paul after he came home from your war.

I’m tagging you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by social media?
I’m obsessed with social media.
I use it everyday.
Its icons stare at my every time I skiff my thumb against my phone’s face.
I follow and tweet you sometimes.
It’s always tells me what’s trending;
Businesses are trending,
Films and shows are trending,
Life is trending.
#EveryoneIsTrendingButMe
It occurs to me that I am America!
I’m liking my own statuses again.

Asia has risen over me,
I don’t think anyone can make me great again.
I’d better prepare for whatever fallout’ll come next.
My emergency bunker consists of two types of marijuana, a meditation rug, a hard drive of private history and journals traveling through the cloud, and 25 of the best friends you’ll never see.
I won’t bother telling to you about my love letters nor the millions of happy pictures that haunt me in a folder zipped away.
I have gentrified the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco,
Sunrise City is next to go.
My ambition is to find a job I love, despite the fact I have no experience with jobs I love.

America, how can I write while you troll me with your comments?
I will continue,
Like Steve Jobs — my lyrics are as individual as his iPhones,
Even more so they’re all different genders.
America, I will sell you lyrics $250 apiece $50 down on your old lyric.
America free Chelsea Manning.
America save the refugees.
America Guantanamo Bay must be shut down.
America I am Dontre Hamilton.
America when I was young, my parents took me to inner city communities and we passed out soup and sandwiches, one in each hand, gave clean water and everything was free, everyone was so thankful and softhearted it was all so sincere, you have no idea how much a small gesture means to people. Mrs. Crawford give me a grand hug, Mr. Lewis found a job with my dad’s shirt and tie, I once played catch with kids I would have never had otherwise.
We all must have been a bunch of freeloaders.

America I can hear your heart pounding with fear in the distance,
Are you sure about this?
It’s them bad socialists again, isn’t it?
Them Socialists
. Them Muslims
.. Them Feminists
… And them Socialists!
The Socialist wants to hijack our privacy. The Socialist’s power mad. She wants to watch us through our phones and our cameras.
Her wants to steal our passwords. Her needs to make our emails red. Her wants our credit cards for the Kremlin Godzilla. Him big bureaucracy running our hospitals.
That no good! Ugh! Him manipulate our elections. Him put big mosques by freedom towers! Umph! Her make us all work for the same hourly wage! Help!
America, this is very serious.
I’d better obey my elders.
It’s true — I’m never going to join the Army or work for upper management,
I question everything and never listen anyway.
America, I’m putting my echo shoulders to the wheel.

America has and will always be one of my favorite poems. It’s the poem that introduced me to Allen’s writing and the rest of the beats. I know I can’t reincarnate the true mantra and prose that Ginsberg so delicately employed, but that’s expected and I’m not trying to do so. I’m just putting my 2017 spin on it, wondering and hoping I’m not alone.

With the detrimental obstacles that lie ahead of us, both near and distant futures, I hope we can all find some solace through the art of writing.