Vaguely Patriotic Poem

Oh, what can I say
and not lie to you?
That you are beautiful
in your naivete like me,
and that it is fake
like my naivete?

That I want to smash you
to bits and start over
completely, build
only from the bottom,
the way we started once?

It's all too funny,
it's so much easier
to just leave you, a coward,
start with another
whose head isn't on backwards,
sleep easily at night.

To even address you, an abstraction
and nothing more, disgusts me.
I should speak only to people.
You don't exist. And the people
largely hate you and love you

exactly as I do, homeless
in their own country
which is a country where compassion
might as well be the passenger pigeon,
useful only to shuttle bits of war

information between doomed soldiers,

and, oh yes, extinct.