The poem describes being "cash strap wet" or deeply in debt, feeling enslaved by financial struggles. It references the history of colonization and westward expansion in America that displaced Native Americans for the profits of others. Overall, it portrays a bleak present of being hollowed out and controlled by corporations and banks while nostalgically recalling Kentucky's natural beauty and whiskey making traditions.
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Cash strap
1. Cash Strap Wet ("soggy bottom")
by Farriss Grey Bear
chinnville, kentucky
april 17th, 2015 A.D.
Cash strapped and buckled under debt,
Soggy slavery, as real as water is wet...
Swallow down the tears,
And bow down to the fears.
Never been equality, lest ye forget,
Televised P.O.B. of fantasy to perfect.
Yes, to confess of the p.oint o.f b.eginning...
Who was losing when the old west was winning?
Another providential lesson to me,
White illegals called it Manifest destiny.
Immigrants repelled with gun, bow, and arrow.
Flints sunk, hymns sung, deep in bone marrow.
Oh whipporwhill, single string of smoke from my still,
Red wax land warrant, signed by the king's own quill.
So now the title is vested with me,
Every coal bank and every last tree.
Forests to farms, factories to finance, all bankrupt.
Rule unchanged by the deranged and corrupt.
Drowning and diving, plumb cash strap wet,
Clad in B.D.U.'s and I.O.U.'s, the typical vet.
Defending democracy that doesn't exist.
The core problems that never get fixed.
Now hollowed out, and laid to ruin and waste,
See how the thieves now make such haste!
The banks tower over the oval and the pentagon,
Obediently inside the great American Panopticon.
Furiously fed by more coal from the hole,
Digitally fulfilled, every cellular soul.
Lost with no G.P.S., no text, no battery..
Ever distracted by consumer flattery.
Whiskey tax refugees, Elijah Craig, Jim Beam, and me..
Prohibition on making on a living, borrow from eternity.
Bluegrass bliss, knob's exhale mist,
Mighty Ohio, like veins on my wrist.
Sun circles faster, still only one master,
In the soggy bottom, the greener pasture....