Branded (Censored) Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Anything can be purchased
Inside 7 seconds:
H-rd-ons, hangovers,
And Happy-Meals
Here in America’s
Drive-thru (Dear God)
We are all up for sale
Our love-lives are commercials
Selling our lo-n’s lettuce,
Product placements
We drive around with our children,
We remove their heads early and cheap
With pacifying machetes /free trade genocide/
And tattoo them with the
Billboards of our
Gods/ Headless, driving over the land
The tin herds run on
The sheer surface under the sun/
Everything is the constant motion
As this sphere is sold,
Bodies moving and pretending
To succeed in getting things done,
Like trees playing around
In the storm

The marketplace trembles
Opening 24 hr. systems of thought
Dedicated to the cycles of deliberation
We work and celebrate under,
The categorizations of the day to better ourselves:
The gated community, the name-brand
Purchased and inspected by the well-manicured
Hand moving around and around like
A pare of roller-skates under the sparkle of
Dead skins draping our shadows in a
Pretending light.

Branded:

Spread across the c-ck as it shoots and
Stains, wasted in the cement when
Bastard things continue to grow
Neon lights blazing the filament garden,
Our heads beginning the steady drift together,
The tide of buying and selling,
The natural selection of this community
(And I so God-damned estranged to it!)
Taught to us, pitched into us like the Spear
Of Longinus from every angle available:
The hideous beautiful torture available to us,
Like bolts from Medieval crossbows
Quilled in skulls, like eager housewives
Warming to the false brightness, the gentle
Death of the shopping mall, the flytrap-
Middle-Class concentration camps

Their men fat, balding,
With great flatulence from
Sunday afternoon chips and guacamole,
While they watch College football,
The useless education of the State that
Schooled them,

Propaganda in the kitchen:
Their women the beautiful shells,
The plastic dolls
With multitudinous curves,
Like a highway shooting it’s
Body northwards along California’s
Coast,
That allows them to slip down
The road like silver-gilled
Fish
Their bounding bo-bs
And fat blue lips
Catching my eye

As they crawl in and out
Of their shells.