The United States of America is like a convention of the International Baton Twirlers Association in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, during a steelworkers' strike when I went there once as a bill collector. The locked-out mill-workers on the street corners stared at the nearly bare-assed middle-class girls dressed in nothing but expensive glittery rags with a dirty gray lust for money and cunt, but they didn't touch the girls or the mills because they weren't theirs. Right and wrong. The girls weren't theirs but the mills were theirs because they built them, ran them, and made everything in them except the money: it went away to where the girls were, so they stood around without the money and watched the girls. Therefore I took the money and flew back to New York to tell the liberal conservatives that the republican democrats are right: There is no left-wing politics in America left. There is the International Baton Twirlers Association.
courtesy of Seven Stories Press from Poems Seven by Alan Dugan copyright 2001
