Borders Burn: Dream On, Americon
I.
Dream On, Americon
If America burns, will you get hot for it, too?
I’m getting excited, I really want to see parts of America burn: Manhattan can burn.
DC can burn, Hollywood can burn and the fence being built along the border can burn.
And the fence being built along the border can burn.
Not that I don’t love the border!
It makes me think in REAL SPECIFICS about my life and it’s details.
I am forced to get fucking organized and plan ahead – to show off, my hot legit status via my return ticket & my utility bill.
It’s fun, like playing grown up, with guns and real jail possibility for lying.
STEP ONE: demonstrate tasteful style and elegance of travel choices. Air France tastes on a Greyhound budget do not cut it!
STEP TWO: demonstrate responsibility and timely bill paying. DO not bring the bill that says turn-off notice on it, bring the one that shows overpayment.
STEP THREE: A time of self examination & others will examine you as well - like a good therapist or probing relative - guards ask deep, timely questions in rapid succession about your choice in employment, in travel, in friends, all designed to test your quick wittedness and mental acuity.
STEP FOUR: Forget what you really know: that Californina and Labanon are on fire tonight and the peace corps has not been called.
That dweeby bill gates and gun happy dick cheny make the news but tonight people lost their homes, and that’s not even counting anyone who got deported or turned back.
Dream on, Americon ™
II.
And I am the white girl they don’t stop at the border, I’ve got a ruddy porcelain face that screams innocence through poverty taken at face value I’d laugh but I get too nervous.
You people in your blue suits make me nervous.
What happened?
I was beyond happiness with her. Im smart but Im ruined.
Im a shock addict and now my brain is broken.
Zapped too often I am hated by petty bureaucrats and wannabe soldiers who want to be me, they wish they could be my wife. But that job is taken.
I am the whore wife to dreaming anarchists and I am pure. Pure as my white face no one suspects is illegal and pure as the day I fell in love and thought it was a good idea to stay.
Having a heart is uphill with one speed in July.
Uphill in a waterlogged place, uphill with no water for two days. My heart I left it at the bottom of the hill by the waterfront in Toronto.
Fuck it, it’s heavy and I was tired.
I held her head on the concrete where it’d hit, the force of my love shoving her down too hard and I fucked her with my whole hand. I fucked her until light shone in both our eyes and I told her I’d never leave. And I didn’t leave I put everything that made sense aside and I stayed.
No papers and I stayed.
No job and I stayed.
Darling, darkling what did you ever do for me?
9//11 was the next day.
III.
I should stop and be more impressed by the magnitude and fortitude of my government.
One day our retinas will be our IDs and then my lucky pretty eyes will be meaningless, but until then I get to blink my way through with my whiteness and my honest face.
Thank you peasant stock family. Thank you jesus.
This is the day that the Gov’t has made, let us rejoice and pay tax on it.
What policy is this now laid to rest on a officers lap who’s fucking with my life.
Stopping families at the border cus theyre not the right color.
Asking questions to keep america safe and sane?
Do terrorists ride the greyhound or are they chauferred in a Halliburton plane.
Who’s causing more problems:
Foreigners willing to work
Or citizens profiting off selling a bomb.
Dream on, Americon.
Every blue eyed border guard has the soul of a toilet. Every time they’re trained not to blink
Every time another border guard is sworn in, someone without papers has to compromise a little more, a lady works a massage job and a guy in an asbestos lined basement. Me, I’ve done one of those jobs but it’s not the one you think.
IV.
Can you get home tonight - Home where you have bills to pay, people who want to fuck you, there’s peeling paint and shots in the night but it is yours, that’s home.
Your late evening walks and your danger.
Your dark alliance and girls, your greed, my greed for girls and beautiful things is home.
Home is where the people who hit you are, home is my life as a plastic jar, tough enough for a man home is 12 hours away in any direction, it’s always open.
Every underground worker twitching in their sleep, every under the table job held in limbo.
There’s no place like home unless you’re not allowed to call it home, then there’s no place like a foreign land that threatens to expel you if you get in any trouble at all.
When I was 16 I crossed the border with a Blockbuster card as my sole form of ID.
After the punks & I got pierced for free on cable access TV we piled into the car and sped off to Toronto and they threatened to call our moms but let us through pronto.
Years later, it wasn’t that easy, so how did I cross?
Casual, like there’s no trouble at all. Casual, like no one’s watching me, casual and smooth to the touch.
Smiling, amused. unfazeable.
gainfully employed in my home country.
No dry throat.
Off to spend money, blissfully unaware of recycling and politeness
I am the tourist everyone hates.
I’m wearing a fanny pack. Talking loudly.
V.
Where do the lonely repatriated hearts go?
Brooklyn.
For those who are tired and waiting for the tree to grow
Brooklyn is the city for my broken heart.
Half an hour to any park, rats, a good place to fall down drunk and wake up changed. Broken further.
I want to cut down the one sad tree so Brooklyn is bare to match me, because the longer I can hold out in a concrete bunker the better.
I am training myself for border trouble, for my future without teeth or love, for my youth in rigor mortis, where I left it, without papers or a job.
In order to
rip through a new city with my milk teeth, come out a winner, without the weekly phone calls and even when the front of an oncoming train looks like home?
VI.
Blond border guard lady, you are not helping me with your pretty smile and your training manual.
How will it be when you’re pushing someone’s face into the ground with your tazer against their neck?
When you’re three against one in the small room and it’s your job to wear the gloves first.
Your lip gloss will not save you from breaking someone’s spirit, and when you go home I hope you are cursed with dreams of setting people free.
Your superior’s mascara still on from 1984, layered over itself for years and that’s where I’ll hide my memories.
I have memories of my enemies:
After revoking my visa she said to me “your community is in the states, you can visit your girlfriend on the weekends.”
After twenty four months and with a partner in Canada she told me my home was where my papers were and stamped EXIT ONLY.
I want to envision her an insomniac but I bet the bitch sleeps.
Not me.
I drove to the nearest town where I knew someone and drank molson black label until I puked.
In the morning, I made like a tourist, drove right back, and made myself a dubious and beautiful life.
Now that life lives at the bottom of a hill in Toronto,
and I
live
in Brooklyn.
As soon as I stopped crossing like a good tourist, as soon as I was securely back on American soil with a real job and taxes taken out, and no longer wore American flag scarves to cross the border I began getting lots of questions. Flags on my passport and everything that cannot be proven.
If I stop believing the border can eat me alive, will it start?
VII.
When they take me I will give purposely misspelled tattoos in jail, My memory of freedom will make me grind my teeth like it does right now anyway.
Americon, dream on.
You are burning tonight, there is a blaze that will not be put out by the young firemen of new york or the ice of an officers heart.
I am standing here tonight for everyone who can’t get across to someone they love.
You deserve to return and they deserve to burn in their sleep.
