Ouroboros

An exploration of American society and the decline of Americana

There was a stillness about it all,
a sort of laconic, unmoving freezing over
of fate and form.
An eerie quietude pervaded the street,
in spite of screeching cars and cackling birds.

The speech of baseball players,
their worn hide gloves sighing
like old men in 5 AM coffee shops,
disgruntled for no purpose other than rote,
creates barely a whisper above the tender wind,
over the echoing irony of the silence.

A thought invades me.
True grit,
American grit,
is not something found in the soul,
but behind our teeth.

Billowing through the air,
eroding our skin and eyes.
Over Navajo clay
and the plains of Nevada, New Mexico,
Texas, California,
and anywhere else too hot in the summer
and too cold in the winter,
for life to survive. 

It is the scent of diesel and dirt,
a sweat stained workman’s shirt.
Burning car tires and hobo stoves in fields in summer.

The taste of tequila
and whiskey and cigarette smoke
and your phlegm and blood
stuck in your throat.

It’s knuckle tattoos
like chicken scratch
through patchwork scars.
Needle scratch rock and blues.
That was America.

And what do we have now?

An exercise in the homogenization of a nation,
a sick trend of renovation and revitalization.
We are a social Ouroboros,
cyclically devouring our pasts
yet returning to the same frame of reference.

Struggling to bulimically regurgitate
something other that that which we've eaten,
but instead eternally vomiting up tails of our past.

We are each the same.
Products of our environment,
frantically choking upon nostalgic reminiscence
as we expel it from our clotted necks.

We grasp for some sense of superiority
above our self indulging,
self imbibing, 
auto-felating society.
None to be found.

I sicken myself
grasping for a past, long dead,
scented by rot and relinquished
of all heavenly aspect.
I am America. 

By: Torrin A. Greathouse