How big are all the Public Figures?
What kind of flesh hangs, hidden behind their Images?
Approaching Salina,
Prehistoric excavation, Apache Uprising
in the drive-in theater
Shelling Bombing Range mapped in the distance,
Crime Prevention Show, sponsor Wrigley’s Spearmint
Dinosaur Sinclair advertisement, glowing green—
South 9th Street lined with poplar & elm branch
spread over evening’s tiny headlights—
Salina Highschool’s brick darkens Gothic
over a night-lit door—
What wreaths of naked bodies, thighs and faces,
small hairy bun’d vaginas,
silver cocks, armpits and breasts
moistened by tears
for 20 years, for 40 years?
Peking Radio surveyed by Luden’s Coughdrops
Attacks on the Russians & Japanese,
Big Dipper leaning above the Nebraska border,
handle down to the blackened plains,
telephone-pole ghosts crossed
by roadside, dim headlights—
dark night, & giant T-bone steaks,
and in The Village Voice
New Frontier Productions present
Camp Comedy: Fairies I Have Met.
Blue highway lamps strung along the horizon east at Hebron
Homestead National Monument near Beatrice—
Language, language
black Earth-circle in the rear window,
no cars for miles along highway
beacon lights on oceanic plain
language, language
over Big Blue River
chanting La illaha el (lill) Allah hu
revolving my head to my heart like my mother
chin abreast at Allah
Eyes closed, blackness
vaster than midnight prairies,
Nebraskas of solitary Allah,
Joy, I am I
the lone One singing to myself
God come true—
Thrills of fear.
nearer than the vein in my neck—?
What if I opened my soul to sing to my absolute self
Singing as the car crash chomped thru blood & muscle
tendon skull?
What if I sang, and loosed the chords of fear brow?
What exquisite noise wd
shiver my car companions?
I am the Universe tonite
riding in all my Power riding
chauffeured thru my self by a long haired saint with eyeglasses
What if I sang till Students knew I was free
of Vietnam, trousers, free of my own meat,
free to die in my thoughtful shivering Throne?
freer than Nebraska, freer than America—
May I disappear
in magic Joy-smoke! Pouf! reddish Vapor,
Faustus vanishes weeping & laughing
under stars on Highway 77 between Beatrice & Lincoln—
“Better not to move but let things be” Reverend Preacher?
We’ve all already disappeared!
Space highway open, entering Lincoln’s ear
ground to a stop Tracks Warning
Pioneer Boulevard—
William Jennings Bryan sang
Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of Gold!
O Baby Doe! Gold’s
Department Store hulks o’er 10th Street now
—an unregenerate old fop who didn’t want to be a monkey
now’s the Highest Perfect Wisdom dust
and Lindsay’s cry
survives compassionate in the Highschool Anthology—
a giant dormitory brilliant on the evening plain
drifts with his memories—
There’s a nice white door over there
for me O dear! on Zero Street.
February 15, 1966
II
Face the Nation
Thru Hickman’s rolling earth hills
icy winter
gray sky bare trees lining the road
South to Wichita
you’re in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute
Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000
Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000
South Vietnamese armed men
our Enemy—
Not Hanoi our enemy
Not China our enemy
The Viet Cong!
McNamara made a “bad guess”
“Bad Guess?” chorused the Reporters.
Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962
“8000 American Troops handle the
Situation”
Bad Guess
in 1954, 80% of the
Vietnamese people would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh
wrote Ike years later Mandate for Change
A bad guess in the Pentagon
And the Hawks were guessing all along
Bomb China’s 200,000,000
cried Stennis from Mississippi
I guess it was 3 weeks ago
Holmes Alexander in Albuquerque Journal
Provincial newsman
said I guess we better begin to do that Now,
his typewriter clacking in his aged office
on a side street under Sandia Mountain?
Half the world away from China
Johnson got some bad advice Republican Aiken sang
to the Newsmen over the radio
The General guessed they’d stop infiltrating the South
if they bombed the North—
So I guess they bombed!
Pale Indochinese boys came thronging thru the jungle
in increased numbers
to the scene of TERROR!
While the triangle-roofed Farmer’s Grain Elevator
sat quietly by the side of the road
along the railroad track
American Eagle beating its wings over Asia
million dollar helicopters
a billion dollars worth of Marines
who loved Aunt Betty
Drawn from the shores and farms shaking
from the high schools to the landing barge
blowing the air thru their cheeks with fear
in Life on Television
Put it this way on the radio
Put it this way in television language
Use the words
language, language:
“A bad guess”
Put it this way in headlines
Omaha World Herald—Rusk Says Toughness
Essential For Peace
Put it this way
Lincoln Nebraska morning Star—
Vietnam War Brings Prosperity
Put it this way
Declared McNamara speaking language
Asserted Maxwell Taylor
General, Consultant to White House
Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero per month
Front page testimony February ’66
Here in Nebraska same as Kansas same known in Saigon
in Peking, in Moscow, same known
by the youths of Liverpool three five zero zero
the latest quotation in the human meat market—
Father I cannot tell a lie!
A black horse bends its head to the stubble
beside the silver stream winding thru the woods
by an antique red barn on the outskirts of Beatrice—
Quietness, quietness
over this countryside
except for unmistakable signals on radio
followed by the honkytonk tinkle
of a city piano
to calm the nerves of taxpaying housewives of a Sunday morn.
Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?
U.S. Army recruiting service sign Careers With A Future
Is anyone living to look for future forgiveness?
Wate
r hoses frozen on the street, the
Crowd gathered to see a strange happening garage—
Red flames on Sunday morning
in a quiet town!
Has anyone looked in the eyes of the wounded?
Have we seen but paper faces, Life Magazine?
Are screaming faces made of dots,
electric dots on Television—
fuzzy decibels registering
the mammal voiced howl
from the outskirts of Saigon to console model picture tubes
in Beatrice, in Hutchinson, in El Dorado
in historic Abilene
O inconsolable!
Stop, and eat more flesh.
“We will negotiate anywhere anytime”
said the giant President
Kansas City Times 2/14/66: “Word reached U.S. authorities that Thailand’s leaders feared that in Honolulu Johnson might have tried to persuade South Vietnam’s rulers to ease their stand against negotiating with the Viet Cong.
American officials said these fears were groundless and Humphrey was telling the Thais so.”
AP dispatch
The last week’s paper is Amnesia.
Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation “of the fabled damned”
or else …
Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
defined as man standing by his word
Word picture: forked creature
Man
standing by a box, birds flying out
representing mouth speech
Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality—
Communism is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
—funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
that never worked in 1956
for gray-domed Dulles,
brooding over at State,
that never worked for Ike who knelt to take
the magic wafer in his mouth
from Dulles’ hand
inside the church in Washington:
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer’s Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy’s
just made a bad guess again
that’s lasted a whole decade.
NBCBSUPAPINSLIFE
Time Mutual presents
World’s Largest Camp Comedy:
Magic In Vietnam—
reality turned inside out
changing its sex in the Mass Media
for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
Generals faces flashing on and off screen
mouthing language
State Secretary speaking nothing but language
McNamara declining to speak public language
The President talking language,
Senators reinterpreting language
General Taylor Limited Objectives
Owls from Pennsylvania
Clark’s Face Open Ended
Dove’s Apocalypse
Morse’s hairy ears
Stennis orating in Mississippi
half billion chinamen crowding into the
polling booth,
Clean shaven Gen. Gavin’s image
imagining Enclaves
Tactical Bombing the magic formula for
a silver haired Symington:
Ancient Chinese apothegm:
Old in vain.
Hawks swooping thru the newspapers
talons visible
wings outspread in the giant updraft of hot air
loosing their dry screech in the skies
over the Capitol
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s
ripped open by metal explosion—
three five zero zero on the other side of the planet
caught in barbed wire, fire ball
bullet shock, bayonet electricity
bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
While this American nation argues war:
conflicting language, language
proliferating in airwaves
filling the farmhouse ear, filling
the City Manager’s head in his oaken office
the professor’s head in his bed at midnight
the pupil’s head at the movies
blond haired, his heart throbbing with desire
for the girlish image bodied on the screen:
or smoking cigarettes
and watching Captain Kangaroo
that fabled damned of nations
prophecy come true—
Though the highway’s straight,
dipping downward through low hills,
rising narrow on the far horizon
black cows browse in caked fields
ponds in the hollows lie frozen,
quietness.
Is this the land that started war on China?
This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?
Are these nervous naked trees & farmhouses
the vortex
of oriental anxiety molecules
that’ve imagined American Foreign Policy
and magick’d up paranoia in Peking
and curtains of living blood
surrounding far Saigon?
Are these the towns where the language emerged
from the mouths here
that makes a Hell of riots in Dominica
Paid for the lost French war in Algeria
overthrew the Guatemalan polis in ’54
maintaining United Fruit’s banana greed
another thirteen years
for the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?
Here’s Marysville—
a black railroad engine in the children’s park,
at rest—
and the Track Crossing
with Cotton Belt flatcars
carrying autos west from Dallas
Delaware & Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff—
a line of boxcars far east as the eye can see
carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies
into the hands of rich longshoremen loading
ships on the Pacific—
Oakland Army Terminal lights
blue illumined all night now—
Crash of couplings and the great American train
moves on carrying its cushioned load of metal doom
Union Pacific linked together with your Hoosier Line
followed by passive Wabash
rolling behind
all Erie carrying cargo in the rear,
Central Georgia’s rust colored truck proclaiming
The Right Way, concluding
the awesome poem writ by the train
across northern Kansas,
land which gave right of way
to the massing of metal meant for explosion
in Indochina—
Passing thru Waterville,
Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy—
paper signs blowing in cold wind,
mid-Sunday afternoon’s silence in town
under frost-gray sky
that covers the horizon—
That the rest of earth is unseen,
an outer universe invisible,
Unknown except thru
language
airprint
magic images
or prophecy of the secret
heart the same
in Waterville as Saigon one human form:
When a woman’s heart bursts in Waterville
a woman screams equal in Hanoi—
On to Wichita to prophesy! O frightful Bard!
into the heart of the Vortex
where anxiety rings
the University with millionaire pressure,
lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,
and students waken trembling in their beds
with dreams of a new truth warm as meat,
little girls suspecting their elders of murder
committed by remote control machinery,
boys with sexual bellies aroused
chilled in the heart by the mailman
with a letter from an aging white haired General
Director of selection for service in Deathwar
all this black language
writ by machine!
O hopeless Fathers and Teachers
in Hué do you know
the same woe too?
I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it’s Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows—
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It’s not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when our trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a mattress—
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white smooth abdomen down to the hair
between our legs,
It’s not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack—
fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita—
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me—
On the bridge over Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language—