Goldplated cobblestones vanish as dirty boots hit

Streets, dark and unfamiliar, fresh off the ship,

These are the Ellis veterans,

These are the soldiers fighting for a tomorrow, warring against their past,

The future is a mighty nation

Taken to its knees by the pleads of children, they are tomorrow,

Governance, dictatorship behind a mask of prototype democracy,

Destroying our own future back to front,

The “unseen” injustices leave no marks

on government consciences,

The fearful beat broken backs newly born to American shores,

Twisting the tongue into strange syllables

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y, I Owe You Eternally, but whY?

Setting pay low I agree to work for nothing,

I agree to live off the clothes on my back

And the food you throw from your apartment windows

Because a cent spent on another is a penny wasted.

These selfish souls don’t understand that

The irony of the world is

xenophobia runs rampant,

Your shoes made strong by our worthless hands,

Your shouts stolen from our language,

And yet, you are still outraged by equality in the land of the free.

The future rolls forward on the assembly line,

Two Nike steps forward,

China fuels their stride, they ride the foreign

coattails over

Native strangers, blind to the slums,

Deaf to all but the call of the profit.

A blaze of oil, a grease fire set under the tails

Of countries around the world,

A trail blazed for profit by those who don’t bother with the details,

Of the fact that those fumes that we can’t see

slowly suffocate us from the sky down,

Raining heat, reflecting billions of tons of gaseous carbon and green stupidity.

Leaders cater to the conservative,

To the corporations keeping profits high.

Drills run ever-deeper into a crushed crust,

Wherever they can find that isn’t paved over by cement, building high the

factory line that assembles dreams,

Every maltreated worker a cog in a greater contraption,

a larger misconception.

Fingers and dollars lost,

Slipped through the seams,

Untouchable companies write laws into the skin of our naïveté, 

We thought we could sail to freedom,

We washed up on the shore of chains and thread.

We work day and night,

so their children can eat at a table Made in China,

In a house built by immigrants paid less

Than little white Sally selling lemonade on the street corner

Of America Boulevard,

And False Hope Lane.