To Be American

To be American again

Teenaged and certain of innocence

Six lanes of Western caravan

Burn fuel to speed up the renaissance

Before the trench coats and the roped-off rooms

The shell-shocked mothers and the TV crews

Foreclosing a grand, old dream

Black motorcade running on empty

Big box and a Ponzi scheme

Drain everything, land of the plenty

In high school, I sang in the choir

With all the Mormons from Rohnert Park

Now all their houses are on fire

Strange glow of oxblood in the dark

I think we all meant well, or so I thought

That season, privilege was a parking spot

Foreclosing a grand, old dream

Black motorcade running on empty

Big box and a Ponzi scheme

Drain everything, land of the plenty

If Reconstruction and the War

Seemed distant back in eleventh grade

How quaint our simple lives before

Seem now in face of the coming days

Foreclosing a grand, old dream

Black motorcade running on empty

Big box and a Ponzi scheme

Drain everything, land of the plenty

Our furniture's on the street

In every church, last rites are spoken

One criminal's soft defeat

Can't change the fact that we're broken