What makes an American

Of all skin tones, home loans, and barren bones

The naked starved hysterical style so signature to the American Dream

Maybe it’s the churning machines, spitting smoke to a stone audience who won’t listen

What makes us any better than yesterday

The love we gain, the weight we frame, or the hate we retain

When did the American Dream become the foreign nightmare

Perhaps it’s a President championing madness in a search for truth

Our compass is marred

“How to disenfranchise a nation in four easy years”

From what I’ve heard, the Dream hasn’t been this blurred since Saigon fell

Our name now internationally disbarred, just as it was

Now I know

The ever shifting weight of a certain shade of white

Unafraid of the immigrant children who will die

A conglomerate of secluded wealth appealing and answering to no one else

This is accepted and this is the norm

The aftermath of a static nation outgrowing the density and immensity of it’s post-Golden glow

Not a Dream but a lucid nightmare of domestic anesthetic

Besides, the man in the tall white castle said so

Is there any way we can turn back now

We’ve regressed to all those centuries ago

Sacco, Vanzetti, and King can only bury themselves in disbelief

Maybe there was never any Dream at all