A Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin lawmen, feelin their notches.
For decent church-goin women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobodys allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories - all right lets see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

To a Roar
Riley Dorton

A few parting words in the form of bad poetry…
Because this is something that is still bothering me.
More than ten years later, I’m still waiting to see
Some form of retribution for the Project for a New American Century
Who hijacked this country from the supreme court floor
And, with the politics of fear,
Held us down for four years more
By doing everything they could
To convince the working poor
To keep on voting red against their own self-interest.
Praise be to the power of willful ignorance!
…and to the consequences suffered
Every
Day
Since.

The Patriot Act.
Turn the American Dream to a nightmarish hell
With a script ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell.
The least patriotic piece of legislature in this nation’s history,
P N A C mapped it all out,
The economics of war are no fucking mystery.
Tapping our phones like they’re entitled to know
Who has the audacity to question the status quo.
While neocon congress labeled dissent as obscene
Via lily-white spokesmen on Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine.

Ben said “Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither.”
But the democrats offer no real alternative, either.
Just two indiscernible sides of the same corporatist coin,
Touting the merits of Reaganomics,
It’ll all trickle down.
Just pick a side
And join.

And people still rush to swallow that red or blue pill,
Though the end result of either is that
SHIT RUNS DOWNHILL.

So, I find myself pissed off at the platitudes that bind
You know “An eye for an eye…
the whole world blind”
Because I’ll always believe we need to settle this score,
And these assholes can’t hide behind rhetoric anymore
When the voices of the hungry grow

From a whimper

To a roar.