Question Everything!

A Thanksgiving Prayer

By William S. Burroughs

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers

Posted November 27, 2020

Thanksgiving Day, November Twenty-eighth, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons
Destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum
Of challenge and danger

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin
Leaving the carcasses to rot

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes

Thanks for the American dream
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through

Thanks for the KKK
For nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches

For decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers
Thanks for laboratory AIDS

Thanks for Prohibition
And the war against drugs

Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business
Thanks for a nation of finks

Yes
Thanks for all the memories, all right let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal
Of the last and greatest of human dreams

William S. Burroughs / Frank Denning

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author whose influence affected popular culture as well as literature.

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