“What happened to us?” we used to say.
Now we just roll our eyes at passing strangers
Doing strange things.
Now we just wave our flag and sip lemonade
While we wait for our favorite 6PM
Radio show to keep at our time.
What happened is we became victims willingly,
We accepted our lonely road
With righteousness.
We held our heads high and believed in a constitution
That was created and sworn upon in vain, in contempt, in disbelief,
Yet all of these cowardly apparitions
And beautiful speakers continued to wow our humble thoughts into thinking
It was all peachy.
It was ordinary.
We fought the ordinary and they learned to tell us it was remarkable.
We fought the remarkable
And they told us it was right.
So we changed channels but drank the same milk –
We never did find that girl,
But we did learn to cool the voice of reason
With fireworks and birthday parties
Because we deserved them.
We were hard workers and deserved our fruits.
We were hard workers and we accepted our lonely road,
But fought it believing what we’d been sold.
Sometimes I gaze into her eyes at night. She whispers words I’ve never heard before,
And we count backwards from our chairs
Until we reach a new paragraph in our romance novels,
And soon it’s time for tea.