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There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight Beyond the ledges of concrete restaurants fall into dreams with candlelight couples Lost Alexandria still burns in a billion lightbulbs Lives cross lives idling at stoplights Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs 'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness' A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window A yogi speaks at Ojai 'It's all taking pace in one mind' On the lawn among the trees lovers are listening for the master to tell them they are one with the universe Eyes smell flowers and become them There's a deathless hush on the freeway tonight as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high sweeps in Los Angeles breathes its last gas and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska sinks with it The sea comes over in Utah Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere An orchestra onstage in Omaha keeps on playing Handel's Water Music Horns fill with water ans bass players float away on their instruments clutching them like lovers horizontal Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster Skyscrapers filled like water glasses Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine Great Books watered down in Evanston Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds buried masts of Amsterdam arise as the great wave sweeps on Eastward to wash away over-age Camembert Europe manhatta steaming in sea-vines the washed land awakes again to wilderness the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets a cry of seabirds high over in empty eternity as the Hudson retakes its thickets and Indians reclaim their canoes
And now our government a bird with two right wings flies on from zone to zone while we go on having our little fun & games at each election as if it really mattered who the pilot is of Air Force One (They're interchangeable, stupid!) While this bird with two right wings flies right on with its corporate flight crew And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit And next year its the great Bush pilot And now its the Chameleon Kid and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap and now its a donkey and now an elephant and now some kind of donkephant And now we recognize two of the crew who took out a contract on America and one is a certain gringo wretch who's busy monkeywrenching crucial parts of the engine and its life-support systems and they got a big fat hose to siphon off the fuel to privatized tanks And all the while we just sit there in the passenger seats without parachutes listening to all the news that's fit to air over the one-way PA system about how the contract on America is really good for us etcetera As all the while the plane lumbers on into its postmodern manifest destiny
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of the day performing entrachats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence
It was a face which darkness could kill in an instant a face as easily hurt by laughter or light 'We think differently at night' she told me once lying back languidly And she would quote Cocteau 'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking' Then she would smile and look away light a cigarette for me sigh and rise and stretch her sweet anatomy let fall a stocking
One grand boulevard with trees with one grand cafe in sun with strong black coffee in very small cups. One not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you. One fine day.
Long long I lay in the sands Sounds of trains in the surf in subways of the sea And an even greater undersound of a vast confusion in the universe a rumbling and a roaring as of some enormous creature turning under sea and earth a billion sotto voices murmuring a vast muttering a swelling stuttering in ocean's speakers world's voice-box heard with ear to sand a shocked echoing a shocking shouting of all life's voices lost in night And the tape of it someow running backwards now through the Moog Synthesizer of time Chaos unscrambled back to the first harmonies And the first light
Night closed my windows and The sky became a crystal house The crystal windows glowed The moon shown through them through the whole house of crystal A single star beamed down its crystal cable and drew a plough through the earth unearthing bodies clasped together couples embracing around the earth They clung together everywhere emitting small cries that did not reach the stars The crystal earth turned and the bodies with it And the sky did not turn nor the stars with it The stars remained fixed each with its crystal cable beamed to earth each attached to the immense plough furrowing our lives
Freer than most birds an eagle flies up over San Francisco freer than most places soars high up floats and glides high up in the still open spaces flown from the mountains floated down far over ocean where the sunset has begun a mirror of itself He sails high over turning and turning where seaplanes might turn where warplanes might burn He wheels about burning in the red sun climbs and glides and doubles back upon himself now over ocean now over land high over pinwheels suck in sand where a rollercoaster used to stand soaring eagle setting sun All that is left of our wilderness
The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom of that september afternoon A cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and tootsie rolls and Oh Boy Gum Outside the leaves were falling as they died A wind had blown away the sun A girl ran in Her hair was rainy Her breasts were breathless in the little room Outside the leaves were falling and they cried Too soon! too soon!
The pennycandystore beyond the El is where i first fell in love with unreality Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom of that september afternoon A cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and tootsie rolls and Oh Boy Gum Outside the leaves were falling as they died A wind had blown away the sun A girl ran in Her hair was rainy Her breasts were breathless in the little room Outside the leaves were falling and they cried Too soon! too soon!