Once Upon a July

Stupidities/degeneracies are the makings
of a parade—loud, thoughtless, pointlessly patriotic
by the bait and switch freedom the meat dolls
have lied into life by believing fabric stitched together
in a particular way has anything to do with freedom
and everything to do with free dumb—
they suffer each other— they ratchet up the pain—
a brute fact of active nihilism—facial recognition
and reconstruction—the organic aspects of reality
is a gimcrack aimed at your pineal gland!

Heath Brougher is the editor-in-chief of Concrete Mist Press. He was the recipient of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award and is a multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. He has authored twelve books, the most recent of which is Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy (Sandy Press, 2024). Read other articles by Heath.