I wrote this poem to those Florida fratboys who threw the Mekong Delta party, where the men dressed like GI's and the women dressed like Viet prostitutes. The first time, they claimed that they didn't mean to offend any one, they didn't know it would be offensive. The next year, they did it again.


No Offense

You struck in the same place twice
igniting homes that you call hootch
twisters of black smoke curl upwards
smogging the glass ceiling

No offense

World globes bought with daddy's credit card
Your pale clammy hands play cut and paste
with geography, paper dolls on exotic hookers,
puberty hard-on with little penises like struggling flags

No offense

It's okay that you're a bigot cuz your girlfriend is Miss Saigon
and your best friend is the same color as Wesley Snipes
and your affirmative action affection got both of them
through the locked and monitered gates of your neighborhood

No offense

It should be no surprise that stray bullets/ civil war/
diseased bamboo stakes / agent orange / charred homeland
legless veterans turned beggars/ exploited Vietnamese women
is all a big
motherfucking
party
to you

No offense

Ladies love heroes in uniform, come to liberate them
from footbinding foes, greased yellowbrown pimps
with your economic downfall at their fingertips
nightmares moving into American dream's neighborhood

No offense

You wake up from dreams of silk cocooned prostitutes
send away for exotic mail order girlfriends
pregnant with assimilation
dying dramatically in your arms

No offense

is your only defense.

So lay down your sandbags
like nameless lumped carcasses
pledge to your brothers
as I will pledge to mine
because we are coming for you

We are asking Lady Liberty
to take us to America
we have come to mispronounce your names

chain your hollow Bruce Lee imitation hi-yaaaa to your throat all you want
it won't save you
those Chinese characters on the front of your shirt which you can't read
tells me your ass is mine
that white skin that has meant individual and good guy and innocent and get out of jail free
will not be honored by us

we will come with gifts of grenades wrapped in banana leaves
bottles of wine filled with agent orange
and a dozen long stemmed red roses
dipped in napalm
we have arms made of machetes
and songs that whistle like bullets
through the monsoon

So make yourself dream through beer
and see yourself as an eagle in the mirror
we will come when you are drunk with yourselves
we have come to clip the wings of vultures

You wanted a Mekong Delta party

So party on
as your frat house is bombarded
the roof is on fire
the roof is on fire
you will dodge bullets on the dance floor
your parents will be chained to sewing machines
to make your uniforms and costumes
your brothers will turn against you
your sisters will become prositutes
you will starve
you will get malaria
you will not get a job
tanks will roll into your nehigborhood
your children will play with shell casings
in crater filled suburbs

there will be nothing left

there will be nothing left

after we come for you

there will be nothing left

no offense.

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