Let me take you to where I’m from, well past the great hype,
well beyond the neon sheath, where they don’t count the blood type.
Where nursing toddlers in leather pants work on the railroad,
who dream of steel-spotted carpet dogs, always on the phone.
Where yellow-bellied, pale-moon boys buy packaged dice kits,
who drink from liquored tubes and buy the news on ghetto roach clips.
And though the sun may set on sunshine street, the rooster never crows.
And the only cats up in this tree are standing on their toes.
Paper dolls with matchbox guts are sold off of Wall Street,
while Claude Monet and company burn bras off of Beale Street.
Where big old cows in five-walled rooms speak Hebrew and Latin.
But it all seems like Chinese to me, though it sounds a lot like Sanskrit.
Where the unintentional bat of an eye can really speak volumes,
and diversity is so esteemed, we gotta include homogeny.
Where some people really think that McDonald was Irish
and Captain Cook, that dirty crook, really was Marxist.
Where vacant-eyed, ceramic snakes are bred without tongues,
made to do arm curls with pencils and breath with chain-link lungs.
The only thing that’s keeping ‘em up is the ground underneath their bellies,
initially born with limbs but amputated cause they felt as weak as jelly.
These slithering snakes, they avoid the nuse by dribbling out their venom.
They beat the heat with mattress springs or anything that they give ‘em.
But panda bears in aluminum trees, they feel the coldest breeze.
And the green lady of the granite sea, she’s accused of being a tease.
Where Chinese cowboys in sombrero hats are washing their new cars.
They clean ‘em in time for their favorite show, the WCW no holds barred.
On the couch they got corn on the cob and Japanese rice cakes.
They make fists and grit and punch the air and talk as if someone’s there.
Their neighbors are from Omaha with ties to the East Coast mob.
One’s half black. One’s a hacker. Another one drives a Saab.
But all of them speak good English to their mother when she’s around.
But they get their clothes from department stores and have to drive to cross town.
Try and show me the color of guilt. I’ll show you the golden calf.
It was melted down, but it’s heart still pounds both sides of the great divide.
Three white girls with ironed ‘fros are driving out to the mall
in their steel-framed carriage, holding plastic despair, in the form of CDs and Barbie dolls.
Trinkets like hairspray, perfume, and make-up, they line the store shelves.
One tries on a Disney gown but frowns cause the sound of the mirror she found was fake.
The other two duke it out for the show that’s supposedly made of glass.
They ask the clerk what it’s really worth. She hands them a blade of grass.
This sweet, mournful “loose concept” album from folk artist Ian McCuen tracks a journey across the bleak landscape of American life. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 22, 2022
A collection of twinkling bedroom folk-pop demos from Fahim Rahman that arcs from hushed intimacy to sweeping cinematic emotionality. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 6, 2021
