The Land of the Discarded

 We now live in the land of the discarded

We see them with their cardboard signs

When they are not shivering in their tents

But mostly they live out of site in discarded places

Under bridges

And abandoned factories which once offered gainful employment

before automation greased the wheels of greater profits and

Drove the rest overseas.

We know why the American dream passed them by

chewed them up and spit them out:

The rich became our big box, high tech, blue-blooded royalty

With all of their extreme wealth and the power it could buy, scraped off the backs of the innocent

Who wanted to work

Who wanted to afford a roof over their heads

Who didn’t want to abandon their dreams

into the bottom of a bottle

But the whiskey knew the game was rigged

And offered the only escape hatch

They could afford.

Minimum wage is always the debate

By those who spend more than that on their dog sitters and frothy lattes.

Maximum wage is never on the table

Only how much of a feeble handout to give those who lost it all at the pandemic’s beckoning.

That we even consider giant permission slips to bring in more desperate millions to our shores

So the newly enriched can reach into their pockets

And complain that providing health care costs too much

Is a fool’s game from the scrap heap of time

We have little to offer the desperate, and what we do have comes with a heavy dose of racism

To keep the machinery of greed churning.

So much needs to be fixed in the land of the free and the home of the brave,

The promised land is now the broken land

And we must embrace our new reality

With a difficult hug

For when millions are already scouring food banks

You don’t dangle a carrot in front of more.