It’s over.
The American Experiment.
It’s over. The results are in.
It failed.
Where do we go now?
Overseas or into the streets?
I don’t want another country.
I want America back.
Country of muskets. Country of tommy guns.
Country of Saratoga. Country of Gettysburg.
Country of Bastogne. Country of Iwo Jima.
Country of Detroit 67. Country of Chicago 68
Burn, Baby. Burn. We cheered Kyiv
as they made the Molotov cocktails.
Are you ready for the armored cars
Reagan and Clinton gave the police?
Are you ready to defend your country?
Are you ready to take it back?
Black Hawks down. Black flags up.
I took that oath once, all enemies
foreign or domestic. Did you?
Or did you just go in to kill
sand n-gg-rs and towel heads?
Are you American or a faction?
Men in masks in unmarked vans
no badges. no uniforms, no insignia
are pulling people off the street
for dissenting from genocide.
My father went to Europe in ‘44
to kill fascists. His comrades mostly died.
They were training as engineers
for the reconstruction of Europe
sent back to boot camp and then put
on a ship. They marched into an ambush
and nearly everyone he trained with died.
As he told me that story my father cried,
Are you ready? To charge a machine gun? They were.
Better a bullet in the chest than one in the back of the head.
* Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe’s reply to the Germans who demanded the surrender of the surrounded 101st Airborne at Bastogne.
NUTS*
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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