I’m fattened on fantasy,

Tinman, Toto, me and Dorothy,

Inflated with meth, drivin a Big Rig Mack truck west,

Headed Silicon Valley, Californi. Imaginary

 

tornado-chaser, cacti-Albuquerque vista, Route 66,

Grand Dragon coven. Warren Zevon death wish.

Baseball mitt, high school gym wrestling singlet, softball pitch

 

Giant hailstone rattling white trailer roof tin

Chubby Gary Larson children

Garrison Keillor’s stubborn Lutherans.

Corn rows, Slipknot, parading Pagans

 

Dim-witted Juliette Lewis waitress addicted to tips

Starkweather, Dillinger, defiant-outlaw-anti-establishment-fizz

Butter-fried Twinkies thicken arteries

 

Bison, coyotes, roadrunner, ACME,

John Deere caps, cotton candy,

Condor, raven, prairie chickens, flattened by titanic SUVs,

 

My upside-down-Mid-West-head is a Puritan with a pitchfork

A red barn, Lana Del Ray, American Gothic,

Mutant nuclear sombrero-wearin scorpion attack

 

America invented English. She had the most important wars.

America holds a million complainin’ guitar-pickin’ Africans

Fenced in with corn, not much better’n cotton

 

The way the States spins it

You’d reckon Europe don’t have her own versiona Injuns,

Rockies, Lucky Strikes, Cadillacs,,

Lynch mobs and funny coloured types.

 

As if America invented the continental climate,

landlocked states without escape, frostbite and sunstrike,

Diners, eggs, filtered coffee, homicidal hitchhikers

 

Steam boats, brown saddles, muddy rivers a mile wide,

Tumbleweeds, Capital City grime,

White, united, alike in fearin’ China.

 

Alike in soppin’ up the natives in white bread and wine

windows wide, cooling purple pie,

Steers, steel, school buses, bullies, Batman

And lonesome Jon Arbuckle staring out the window.