because blogging at 12:30 am is therapeutic...(warning. this post could make you angry.)

So, I seriously had to use dictionary.com to look up how to spell 'therapeutic'. Moments like this make me wonder why they gave me a college degree. This thought is also triggered by my inability to figure percentages of random numbers.

Now, in reality, I know that my degree is in neither spelling nor percentage figuring, or anything close to either...though I suppose spelling is big part of a foreign language...but if we want to go there I don't even know how to say 'therapeutic' in Spanish, which might make me feel worse, so I don't think I need to go there.

Okay, so maybe blogging in the wee hours is not a good idea. i posted this because I wanted to talk about how i really really want to start writing more. And sharing more. And then I realized that I don't have what i wanted to share on this computer because I'm on my new laptop (yeah baby!) so now, i just spent like 20 minutes looking through my email (note to self, clean up my email) and i could've typed that poem like 9 dozen times by now...*sigh*

So, enough of that, here's this. If you didn't know I'm sort of a raging liberal, I am, and this poem might make you a wee bit angry if you aren't. Don't hate me. :-)

Note: This poem references a line from Allen Ginsberg's America, which is "America, I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry". The original inspiration for this poem was a class exercise to pick a line from a poem and be inspired by, or write off of this line. So i did it and I love it.

Dear America


I am ashamed of you. My shame grows stronger every time I watch the news.
You hide your mass destruction in the closet with your love for the Contras, Pinochet…
and your distaste for all things progressive.
How many skeletons are there, in that closet,
where you hide the truth about your lies?
Aside from the bodies coming home under that flag of yours,
you kill children, mothers—innocent people who have never wronged you.
Decades later, we still mourn for Vietnam—-yet the millions who died did not teach you.
You hide behind the fallacy of democracy, as though democracy alone can cure the world.
It has not saved you, you wretched whore of a country.
America, you have abandoned your children, your future.
You give us nothing…but expect us to be fed by our First Amendment rights.
You denigrate those who do not meet your standards---the indigenous, the forced.
You hose your own down in the streets when they call you out for your hypocrisy.
Your elderly are forced to push french fries to pay their bills, and your middle class is shrinking because we cannot afford you, but you call yourself successful.
I think I wanted to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
Now I want to be free of all of this, of all you stand for underneath those stars and stripes.
I want you to be something I am proud of.