Ralph Monday- A Poem

Julie Got it Right

The '60s was the end of the America that the rest of the world liked.

Julie Newmar

A slinky cat in her eighties, many lives

lived across sundry American eras, it is like

someone drew down an iron curtain between

the generation born in the 1930s and the boomers

who created sonic noise afterwards.

Apollo left after 1963, Narcissus and Dionysus

infected the national bloodlines. The Rubicon was

crossed and the death of culture began.

How old now this new America? 239 years, young as

countries go. Aging gracefully? Not so much, more like

an angry hydra with misplaced rage.

More like indolent children denied incessant pleasures,

more like a carnival, a freak show, screaming and

whimpering entitled babies who have earned nothing,

instead consumed like Dante’s gluttons, preaching

race, gender, class from a secular pulpit, controlling

language which controls the mind, a Dionysian orgy,

Disagree with the politically correct gods and be made

a pariah, a wandering ghost ship, labeled bigot and insensitive,

while they never view their own hypocrisy drifting

though this museum of social decay. “The Day the Music Died,”

was the birth of culture’s death.

Dionysus is here again, held in sway, for a time by

Augustine and reason, placed high on the throne by

pop-culture drivel, the 1960s his adopted father, don’t

they realize that steps never work? Read the Greeks. Apollo

is the banished parent.


 Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.