Cy, (I hate this bastard phone and trying to type on it - in sum, I'd strongly suggest dropping the task and repeated it's America, right - they don't accomplish annything that the poem doesn't already accomplish in subtler and more skillful ways)
This piece is lyrical and almost minimalist. I enjoy it very much.
On the one hand, this lyrical quality is central to the poetics of this piece. The almost sing-song repetitions, the chorus-like quality of the recurrence of certain words, like rosemary. And you achieve a kind of trimmed down purity of language that fits the poem's subject. The sing-song poetics are almost--but not quite--the voice of the central character--who after all "bites [his] tongue," but seem to arise out of the mutual dance of aestheticizing deception created by both characters. Most poignant and subtly tragic--more world weary and melancholic than tragic, I guess--is the awareness of the poem and its characters of their deception in combination with an unwillingness or inability to do anything about it. The poem tells you its sing-song isn't real ("pretend again and again"), and invites the reader to be lured in and ensorcelled by its seduction.
That said, I felt that the repeated use of ya and it's America / right were overkill. We don't need them for the poem's lyricism, nor do we need them to understand its characters
