Tuva Street Song To America Poem by Charles Cross

*First Note*

Dear Nancy, forward the horses and sing to the hills,
The thick-book beau lives in the sweet estate
And breeds with red apples on the red carpet.

Dark handsome limos, engine knights move between trees,
Swinging perfume in the masked breeze,
Generating stars from the canyon floors.

First note floats the vortex west to east coast
Through Trump fantasies and tall credit babes
To the retail prophet. Praise to Armani! Praise to Hilfiger!

Chandeliers and chocolate refineries hum hymns to the horse tracks,
Crowded bachelors bell silver disciples
Between the cracks of their finest suites.

Moses is a dancing Fred Astaire from the mountain,
Leading well-fitted young men on
The Cellular Highway to private school.

Shooting stars are paid and clocked in the studio.
The Bureaucratic posse rest on the shore
With our wishes materialized on the horizon.

Casino gods and oil-slick Hollywood producers
Stimulate retirees, young sailors and prostitutes
Beat the blood of this nation for a fat stack of moving cash.

Sing to the silver! Sing to the gold!
Sing to the surgeon who never grows old!
Praise the repairs! Praise America's youth!

*Second Note*

Tonsure man in the eye of the press says,
'Cooperate or betray your beloved country,
Lose your soul, and be the Antichrist you are.'

Christ is owned yonder by the West,
Used, commercialized to industrialize
A spirit of oblique transmission to wireless technology.

Oil junctions happily play for the Utopia
Of large scale gambling enterprises:
Ancient railroads assemble and tax Heaven's last reservation.

Rippling products, packed and processed and sent
To smokers, drinkers and church-goers,
Chanting and consuming in the small fix of life.

Fear Communism! Fear the jury!
Fear Death
And the penalty for standard living!

Minds flee like birds from the Bush Virus,
A contagious ignu disease
Singing in the old pale parade.

Bridges are closing; the pearly gates will extend no time,
'Once more, will you cooperate?
Or burn with The Beatles and The Beach Boys,

Melt under the rock with the natives and the Buddhists,
Burn forever in the gaping hole of the world,
Burn forever in your true alien heart? '

*Third Note*


Christmas arrives on the slick plates of orphans.
No Mother Russia. No Father Christmas.
Abandoned babes of the starry land sit and pray.

Social threats ambush the immigrant flocks.
Airports will peel a man's dignity with paranoia,
And slice him open with Gitmo.

Children write poetry in basements with the rats and spiders,
Above are full-course meals,
Parents talk orderly about disorders.

Little boys and girls sleep with the sound of dirty laundry.
They sleep under radar.
They sleep alone.

Babbling bats hang over the crimson fireplace,
Casting shadows on Main Street,
Where the police stand tall.

The pregnant South feeds jolly Cupid
With welfare checks and divorce:
A concurrence of love and fallacy marked in the womb.

The gray-haired apartheid shouts down
To the heel and toe
Saying, 'Do as you're told! '

A hard muscle weakens as the back breaks
Working fields of tobacco
Meant to rape the pockets of all.

Meth cooks are never unemployed,
Yet draw unemployment
Laughing down the hill through the smoke-stacks.


Dried-up cactus girls flaunt seeking street corners;
Painters and lawyers stop by,
Lifting the head, and squinting the eye.

Fingertips are rented out by nutritious hope.
They wait in government lines;
They fall somewhere in the middle.

Dad dances with the bottle; Mom plays in shattered porcelain.
The banks are foreign,
And suicide and starvation smile in the next room.

The bottom bodies of the country scream aloud,
'We are strong! We are wise!
And we are dying fast! '

*Last but not Least*

Mickey Mouse marks the American Genesis.
Disney's animated pawns
Power Washington.

Mighty Mustangs pound city concrete with the
Sound of parallel passivity
Beating in a giant bass.

Cigarette smoke soars from the lusty camel and his lusty bride.
Into the lusty movies and magazines,
Into the lusty mouths of cool.

Bedrooms flash with reality sitcoms
Travelling over satellite bridges
Springing in curtained apartment walls.

Tarzan roars over a Phil Collins song:
You'll be in my TV
Tonight, and my utility bill tomorrow.

Skyscrapers plunge from islands where
Squawking radio announcers read
Squawking stories through a cigar voice.

The children are humble on the thick carpet,
Under the chimney smog,
Under the red, white and blue.

In front of television deities of the land,
Poor families wake up
Between conspiracy and springtime.

Bulls of ecstasy point their horns toward the Morning Song,
Who listens to the coming tones
In this vast human wilderness.