that was the year

that was the year we went sleeping and they came back with facism and war and some other bad shit. we slept a re-starting pollution, thirty years gone by. nationhoods, we let them. we let our hair grow long and uncombed as if it made us something while the empire grew, even as it grew nervous. some old guy said it was morning through a shaky head and we slept as they deafened our dirty songs into great smoked quantities. none of us got arrested, but there was a labeled maximum security somewhere. we sold guns for our tax base. laws were passed to pass us by. they set a couple people free and lowered the voting age by eleven million who were all put on the list they made to keep track of their lists. convention halls grew voices, sang “over there, over there”. they monitored our reveries, a listening to silence us. we proved nothing and they proved nothing. we slept blanketed by counter measures of eviction and deportation and other phrases we never quite understood. temporary stats of sky. immigration anti-bodies. a haze of drug dogs and bordered beds. they had attorneys and we had must-see thursdays. trance ambassadors helped us wave white flags and burn our passports. we fell in love with better machines who were infinite in the face of the game. balloons fell from the ceiling. we slept sound-scared in the sound of those machines, almost as bad as the music that played us. they got re-elected so we voted for them. they assigned colors, opened files, numbered our days and we wore buttons. we loved our loser kids, beautiful boys and girls. somehow they never routed us completely, which was how we slept. a third of our lives. where we dressed just like them.