rose city, or tribute to woody guthrie

on that amtrack slow rider movin heavy

doesn’t pause to come up for air or dare

to make a stop by the mountain so i can

pick the daisies off the side of the road

where the people who are called lazy work hard

to build a shelter from the storm that’s warm

but it looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a

few pieces lost which is the cost of living

and working in a city with no king just fifty

cops that buzz around like bees on a sickly

sweet festering wound of a city that lacks

humanity and grows roses out of its bones

to decorate the homes of a few moneyed folks

who smoke all of the air out of the factories

that all the mommies and daddies and

hard-on-their-luck Communists out to earn

a few bucks and learn how to make it in

a world that’s on a fast track back to

dinosaurs and all-out wars if they can’t 

function without so much oil consumption

burned in a colorful fission of rainbow

capitalism that makes the ghost of ginsberg

feel unheard and every day another overworked

head drops dead without a day to say ‘loved one

won’t you piece the puzzle with me elsewise

i won’t get no release and i want you to

remember me’ where the pieces of 

corrugated metal make the sides of this

hellhole we call home because we don’t know

how to go away from this bubble under

which no one’s humble they all say ‘alright

i’m right you’re poor there’s the door’

and what’s more you feel alone because it was

so long since you saw your neighbor

you’ve been so hard at work for your labor

to be commoditized as Moneybags wiping 

their brows with oily rags eye the prize

to be won for mass-producing a puzzle

of a smoking train romanticizing the pain

of some railroad worker in ripped jeans

and rebrand it the american dream

so it’ll seem to your daughter like it doesn’t

matter where you come from or if you

own a gun someday this land will be yours

too only four score and seven years ago

the land was still stole n it’s no closer to

being any less colonially bulldozed by

a few folks who brought nothin but boats

and diseases to float this land so it could

be yours and mine if we commoditize

our time and don’t write in rhyme and

ride the rail on a coach window seat

that still cost as much as one month’s bill

from the doctor we can’t pay which is why

i’m on this amtrack slow rider movin heavy

just tryin to keep afloat til the levee breaks

lettin loose the overworked underpayed mamas

with sixteen-hour days and dads cryin at

the floor or makin their way out the door

their musician kids on the west coast packin up

to make the most they can in the midwest

get blessed and if you’re lucky n escape

this materialist fuckery maybe you can

climb up the tall mountain and join

zarathustra only to discover he died

in a pile of bones and dried roses