How I Became A Full-Blown American Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

Carefully watching my step
the tip of each of my foot lands safely
between the cement macadam cracks.

I became expert at such feat
thanks to playing on the sidewalks
of Casablanca the hop and skip game

all we children used to play before
the advent of the personal computer.
My aversion to divisions and fractions

has evolved from the youthful fear
of arithmetic and mathematics.
It has matured to a full-blown phobia

of pigeon-holing mankind's thinking.
We, Americans, subliminally appreciate
everything packaged just rightly so.

As a matter of fact we're either
so gullible or so facetious in our happy
Hollywoodian endings make-up

that appropriately packaged pebbles
at one time sold like peanuts
at the price of diamonds.

I remember sitting in a bar in the Bay Area
with a friend of mine fortuitously across
the future peddler of the Pet Rock

and overheard him say, the ugly American
(he apparently was educated enough
to know of Eugene Burdick's book)

is nuts and that he could make a fortune
selling rocks to him which he later did
with great success. Even I became

a one-time customer of his by contributing
to his first million dollars and proving
by such deed how Yankee-sized I became.