Uncle Sam's Decline

“Young Zak, no clinchpoop, returned home each summer full of the best shit one might retain at school. None of that ordinary preprofessional crap, Zak studied the old school—its literatures, philosophies, and histories—the best bathroom reading found in America. He went to one of those cold New England colleges somewhere between the city and the country, where somewhere between two and three thousand potty-trained youth take more cups of coffee than classes each day. They wore holed if holistic clothes, smoked cloves, ruined lungs, fondled loves—suburban doves desperately searching for soul in Nineteenth-Century Russian Lit or Contemporary Jazz Music Crit. Up North, Zak learned to privilege the other, signify the Mother, and love not thy Father so much as thy brother. But of course, rhyme was forbidden, and by sophomore year, while his virginity pledged to remain on hand, his eyesight left without even a word of goodbye.”