Only in America
Only in America can you kill a tree
to get a bike. What self-respecting
black man leaves his Brooklyn home
with an axe? He wants to take this tree
down. He wants to take this bike out,
he wants the only tree left in New York
because he doesn't have a license.
And so he swings until the muscles
in her arms grow weary and the frustration
in his mouth blurts out in angry swears.
All I wanted was a goddamned bike.
All I wanted was to fell a tree that does
little more than take up needed space.
He throws the axe because his hands
won't chop anymore.
And when the tree comes down he runs
shocked, but cannot escape the charges of his
criminal mischief. I'm surprised he was not more
pleased. If worth was measured
in the rings in a tree, this Brooklyn man,
the head on his axe gleaming with wooden
fibers, would be empty of his worth, his biggest
contribution to society--nothing like George
Washington, merely a tool carrying tools,
a bandit disappearing from common
understanding. I'd set that man up next
to the stump of that tree he left behind,
chain him up to the fallen bike he tried
to steal and tell him that before he cuts
another tree, that at least this tree gives
oxygen, gives life, which is more than what
this man deserves and I'd probably line up
the people surrounding him and chain the useless
wrists into a weak-link chain against Darwinism
for just watching him do it in the first place.
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