A Slam Poem for America

(Disclaimer: I’m not sure how this will read since it’s meant to be performed, but I figured I’d risk posting anyway. Also, before you read, I think it should be noted that I’m an American citizen, and I think questioning, critiquing and holding your government accountable is patriotic. I encourage you to reserve judgment until the end. Thanks, all!)

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I hate America; therefore, I hate myself.

For willingly eating a steady diet of propaganda through the years, for gobbling it up unquestioning, licking my lips and wishing for more. I once was a member of a high school club called “The Patriotic Youth Council.” If it wasn’t so sad, I could laugh about it.

I hate America; therefore, I hate its citizens.

Stupid, willfully ignorant pieces of shit scared of a woman with an opinion. Scared of a black man with a comb. Scared of a Muslim with a headscarf. Scared of a Mexican with an accent.

I hate America; therefore, I hate myself.

For believing lies about a city upon a hill. For believing lies about the beauty of its institutions. For believing that change could come from elections and hearings and the so called court “of law.”

I hate America; therefore, I hate its citizens.

Brainwashed, hateful, arrogant men in uniform and women in invisible chains held tightly in place by the insidious hands of the father, the patriarchy that is ingrained in every stitch of every fabric from which this country is sewn.

I hate America; therefore, I hate myself.

For being blissfully white in so many ways, living an un-interrogated life for too long, secretly wanting to touch black folks’ hair and questioning why they’d burn their own neighborhoods.

I hate America; therefore, I know that I am learning. That my eyes are being slowly uncovered, and though the light is painful, it is illuminating. It shows me so much more of the horizon than I could ever see before.

I hate America; therefore I know that I must reach out to my fellow citizens so that they too may learn to hate the soil from which their ideals were grown, so that they may question what is just and righteous, so that they may encounter every authority with skepticism and maintain at all costs the autonomy of not only their own bodies and minds, but of all the bodies and minds that crowd city streets and drive trucks to work. The bodies that plow fields and punch computer keys, that have children and have only dogs, the bodies that need to change to match their souls and that love the bodies that match their own.

I hate America because I love it.

I love it so much that if you cracked open my skull I’m convinced the Declaration of Independence would be etched into the holes around my eye sockets. That you’d find the Gettysburg Address carved into each of my ribs. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech written in Braille inside the ventricles of my heart so that you could really feel it. Hillary Clinton’s declaration that women’s rights are human rights nestled safely within the walls of my uterus. Obama’s message of hope keeping my white blood cell count high.

I hate America because it has disappointed me more than any friend or teacher or parent ever could.

It had the power to lift me up to heights unimaginable, but instead has buried me beneath the bones of slaves and suffragettes and Black Panthers and indigenous peoples and gay men and transgender women and HIV victims and unarmed black boys and unarmed black girls and caged children.

I cannot breathe beneath the weight of America’s sins. I will suffocate unless I rise up from under them and scream, filling my lungs with the fire of my anger so that I can burn its institutions down, so that we might start again.

Join me and let's be cleansed together in the ash.