A Thanksgiving Prayer

like a bird on a wire

like a drunk in the midnight choir

I have tried all my life

to be free

Leonard Cohen

thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons

destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

thanks for a continent a world to despoil and poison

thanks for Indians Afghanis and Iraqis to provide

a modicum of challenge danger and entertainment

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin

leaving the carcasses to rot thanks for bounties

on wolves and coyotes thanks for the American dream

to vulgarize to falsify until the bare lies shine through

thanks for the KKK for neo-Nazis and for a new

secret fear based government that is dismantling

our Bill of Rights and protecting us by increasing

censorship thanks for nigger-killin lawmen feelin

their notches thanks for decent church-goin men

and women with their mean pinched bitter evil

faces who don’t understand that Jesus never

killed nobody who don’t understand that there’s

only One Commandment not 10 who don’t understand

thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" "Kill and Eat a Vegetarian"

bumper stickers thanks for laboratory AIDS thanks

for Prohibition and the War On Drugs thanks

for a country where nobody’s allowed to mind

their own business thanks for a nation of snitches

thanks for filling the prisons for building new prisons

and filling them too so corporations can continue

to have slave labor Yes Thanks for all the memories

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of

the last and greatest of human dreams

Ron Whitehead

(with Special Thanks to my friend William S. Burroughs)

Copyright © 2004 Ron Whitehead