ASSIMILATE genteel genocidal
eurocentricity at Multiversity U.

CELEBRATE your color-
ful, quaint lack of power and
authority with cathartic, forked

DEMONSTRATE BUT DON’T
AGITATE the powers that be.
Become schooled
in their dictates
and you will be cool
as cash, closed mouthed
as quiet money.

ROMANTICIZE the way the masses
around the world have been
and are institutionally knocked
down, knocked up, kept
down, stepped on and stepped

over by the upper classes
and their agents, the true
big dog git ovah gangstas:

BE FUNNY about five centuries
of nullified negroes, four centuries‚
sold lots of three/fifths human
beings. Be hilarious about “bad” hair,

COLLABORATE. Buy into The System
that eats migrant workers for bread:
grape, bean, lettuce, and apple
pickers, underpaid, overworked,
ununionized southern female fish
house workers and “illegal” ones
from Central America who fell through
NAFTA’s net to our up-
lifting, fishes and loaves,
under-the-table, life-threatening work

“ethic.” Invest in down
sizing megamergers that leave u.s.
meager workfare jobs making hamburgers.

APPRECIATE a century of kindly quotas.

EQUIVOCATE recent years of negative action,
“reverse discrimination” rhetoric reaffirming
supremacy of the national myth:

“DON’T WORRY
BE HAPPY !!

BE CIVIL about all that
and “universal,” too.
Pursue your happiness
by any (unjust) means
necessary.

APPROPRIATE. And you just might
be a limited (undeserving) “success,”
live LARGE and unserving
in this mass mess
we all call America.

New Bedford, MA, Unitarian Universalist Everett Hoagland's poems have appeared in periodicals including American Poetry Review, The Progressive, and the World and been anthologized in The Garden Thrives: 20th Century African American Poetry and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. His recent book is This City and Other Poems (Spinner Publications).