Middletown, Connecticut (and no better in Alabama)

[joel]

It’s quintessentially America:
New England’s intersecting streets of Washington
and Main— with businesses and stoops,
apartments overhead and churches on
the greens, and banks, cafés and libraries
extended like the hands of liberty
with welcome, welfare and well-intended shit—
where businessfolk and crazy people sit
and mumble nonsense words of flibberty
and gibbety like hives of saintly bees
in glassolalic buzz because their drawn
to be America—and these are hoops
we jump through, both those putrefied and posh
who rhyme America, Despairica.

I went to school in nineteen ninety-nine
and somewhere in my freshman year the flag
of Dixie flew in Williamsburg, a rag
of red and blue-crossed-stars: it bore a line
of “Heritage, Not Hate” as if its sign
were healing at the Campus Center, magnifying
racist history to brag
about with other devils serpentine.

But I was born and raised within a state
that owns that flag, that wrestles with its sins—
and I’m aware of people there whose breaths
speak stupid words’ delusion more than hate,
but any fucked New Englander who pins
that rag on Main Street’s guilty of its deaths.

[dadio]

Very good, Joel.

I’m aware of people there whose breaths
speak stupid words’ delusion more than hate,
but any fucked New Englander who pins
that rag on Main Street’s guilty of its deaths.

love this-