Your future grandchildren might regard you as 
something of a supreme being by association
since you were born in the USA
during the world’s most incredible unnatural happenings
like Hitler’s hell and America’s bombs
like orbiting the heavens 
like eating freeze-dried ice cream

Yes you can tell them 
you were here in the early days for Fats Domino 
and Marilyn and Gandhi and the Beatles
and E. E. Cummings and Betty Friedan  
for Salinger and Andy Warhol and Diana Ross
for Sleeping Beauty and Star Wars and the Godfather 
for the fall of small pox and the Berlin Wall
for the transistor and the geodesic dome and Dolly the Sheep
for IBM and Pac-Man and Apple
for solar rooftops and LEDs and the World Wide Wonderful
for the hope of Barack Hussein Obama
And you can claim you allowed all this greatness
if only because you agreed 

They might ask if you also agreed 
to what happened to Mosaddegh and JFK 
and MLK and Salvador Allende
and Vietnam and Biafra and Iraq
or what you did to help out in Bhopal and Haiti and Liberia
or how much of your money went to save democracy
and how much to Wal-Mart and BP and Monsanto and China
instead of the Standing Rock Sioux
and what kind of car you had
when channels split the Greenland ice sheet 
and Midway and Florida started to go under
and the Great Barrier Reef began to turn white 
and 300 wildfires burned in Alaska all at once

They might ask
and you might have to tell them the whole truth
Diana Ross and only Diana Ross 
could be the voice of the Supremes

Bio: Jack Cooper