Recycled people
With non-toxic attitudes
Clutter my soul
Liposuctioned personalities
With low-calorie careers
Censored hallucinations
Alphabetical lovers
With fantasies arranged in numerical order
And your income tax pays for potholes
and paychecks for jobless bums
and the cops who charge you $85
for rolling through a stop sign
And your sales tax pays for a new coliseum
so athletes who are paid $7 million dollars
for a six month season
won’t be homeless
and for the governor’s limousine
while you drive a 1971 Pinto
or a 1982 Cavalier
You bought her drinks, then she took you home
You bought her dinner, then she took your freedom
You bought her clothes, then she took you to the cleaners
You bought her pleasure, then she took you to court
and you’ve been paying child-support ever since
Stuffed in your cubicle with your serrated heart
—half of it
Non-fat entertainment
Seen by fruit-flavored shampooed bleached roots
Minimum wage genius
While the millionaire gangster watches cable TV on a leather
couch in minimum security
That comes out of your paycheck, too
Your Jazzercise and Tae-Bo gave you stretch marks
And your 20 minutes of pleasure put black circles under your eyes
You wait in traffic and you stand in line
Just to renew your license so you can wait in traffic
Behind the blind and indecisive
who should’ve failed the test
Standardized testing for unique individuals
And colorful names for genetic beauty
A flaming cross puts smoke into the clean Southern air
A flaming bank account pumps s**t into smelly Eastern rivers
While your hard-working accountant snorts crushed crystals
and waits for a spaceship in a comet
Insulated music
Heard by drafty minds
Who think that F. D. Roosevelt is a street on the West Side
And Martin Luther was a black Man
And George Washington is a bridge
Iwo Jima is a movie
And Shady Cove is a middle-class subdivision
And Saturn is a car and AC-DC is a rock band
—“Oh? You can’t read? Well, have WE got a JOB for YOU!”—
Get comfortable on your rent-to-own couch
sit back with a cheap bottle and overpriced and overtaxed
cigarettes
And watch the days slip by
And wish you lived on “Dallas” or “Beverly Hills 90210”
or on “Deep Space Nine”
Yesterday was better than tomorrow...