The ones who stole it from Iroquois and Seminole, Choctaw and Cree, then forced Black slaves to work it till they bled.
The ones who “appropriated” from Toltec and Olmec, Aztec and Maya (when they had made a new country), then broke the new country on an anvil of iron, taking the best, “removing” survivors south of the river to the hardscrabble country of sagebrush and cactus, in the land without borders.
The ones who made a Declaration and a Constitution arrogating to themselves the right of rebellion, the right of election, but to those outside of their silk-stockinged class—the right of obedience, the fealty of surrender.
The “Captains of Industry” who herded the masses into drudgery factories, shops built on plunder, despoiling the wonders of canyons and prairies, giving back sustenance while hoarding and building Potomac mansions, Hudson castles.
Cattlemen and rustlers, hired guns, Pinkerton goons, G-men and “revenooers,” cavalry coming in the hard nicks of time, roughshod-riding sheep-men and farmers, injuns, wetbacks, the abandoned, the desperate.
Politicians and lawyers spinning silken webs from embouchures of mealy mouths, embezzling the simple, the uninformed, the hard-working, the trusting–of scraps of life’s savings, their holdings, the runes of their ruins.
Flak-men and flak-women knowingly contorting, packaging air, wrapping dreams in tissues of promises, poisoning, defrauding, lollygagging, Jim-crowing, filibustering, carpet-bagging, stealing airwaves, vision-impostors, re-shaping, repossessing.
Haters, liars, shape-shifters, refashioning dreams, grotesqueries of power, wealth, arrogance, murderers awarding themselves the right to kill millions, seize gold, oil, water in other lands from other people in the name of the country they stole from the Red man, the Black man, white workers, the indentured, day-laborers and children.
Wily, clever, sinuous, slanderous drum-beaters for false causes, warmongering slumlords, dumb lords of the manor robbing health, education, living wages, dignity, history from the hearts of the people, from the minds of the people, from the souls of the people.
Scribblers of borders shipping jobs over borders, imprisoning those within and without, separating, fragmenting, scattering, obviating.
Prison guards, security guards, cops, militia, national guards in the service of the State, the elite, the decadent, the abhorrent, the whoring.
Illegal aliens: takers, heart-breakers, despair-makers, fakers at the top of their dung heaps, burying hope in their dung, burying home, family, beauty, innocence, friendship, community,—until the dead awaken, until the dead say No, seize back, and blood pulses in cadaverous veins, and the clay gods break, and the shallow icons are trumped and broken, the chained knees unchained and the chains broken, the murdochs of murkiness broken, and love is reborn in the world again, the possible flourishes in a heap of old bones, language ignites synapses of power, and courage reigns in the world again under the eye of old wisdom.