Merika, Love Poems

Book excerpt: Merika, Love Poems uses free-form, poetical choruses to laud, love, loathe, lambaste, and lecture on modern society, politics, and empire. MLP tells about shedding the young and deluded belief in the sanctity of the American Dream; encountering, grappling with, and accepting the truth about injustices and inequalities born of immunity from consequences; and quitting the narcotic of capitalistic mania. MLP sings about every person pouring personal vices into a social-economic-political system and claiming victimization from the byproduct. MLP chronicles the attempt to reclaim responsibility and morality, the attempt to formulate honest living, even when such honesty costs painful self-reflection. MLP is first and foremost a love story, just not the kind of love story that ends, necessarily, with happily ever after.