Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud



Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison







Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes



Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,







And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,



He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu







Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them



Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels







Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds



Of the thick satin quilt of America







And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,



or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,







And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,



It was not blood but money







That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills



Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,







He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were



Clogging up my heart—







And so I perish happily,



Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—







Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad



Would never speak in rhymed couplets,







And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes



And I think, “I am asleep in America too,







And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”



And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:







“I was listening to the cries of the past,



When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”







But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable



Or what kind of nightmare it might be







When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you



And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river







Even while others are drowning underneath you



And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters







And yet it seems to be your own hand



Which turns the volume higher?





