backed with bomb murder,
backed with Propaganda—
Soldiers on this train think they’re fighting China
Soldiers on this train think Ho Chi Minh’s Chinese
Soldiers on this train don’t know where they’re going
John Steinbeck stop the war John Steinbeck stop
the war John Steinbeck stop the war.
And the French Army surrounded Madrid,
and the Spanish Army’d marched simultaneously surrounded Paris.
Then they found out
it was hopeless.
Generals sent messages,
Call off the attack!
and the Armies rushed to a neutral place confronted
& killed each other.
They just wanted to fight,
no question of Madrid or Paris, then.
—& Johnson backed
Saigon’s latest conditions:
N. Vietnam withdraw all aid,
Dissolve Withdraw Viet Cong.
These are conditions,
contradicting Johnson’s Unconditionals.
These languages are gibberish.
John Steinbeck thy language is gibberish,
thou’st lost the language war,
cantankerous phantom!
Newspaper language ectoplasm fades—
Everybody sneeze!
Lightning’s blue glare fills Oklahoma plains,
the train rolls east
casting yellow shadow on grass
Twenty years ago
approaching Texas
I saw
sheet lightning
cover Heaven’s corners
Feed Storage Elevators in gray rain mist,
checkerboard light over sky-roof
same electric lightning South
follows this train
Apocalypse prophesied—
the Fall of America
signaled from Heaven—
Ninety nine soldiers in uniform paid by the Government to Believe—
ninety nine soldiers escaping the draft for an Army job, ninety nine soldiers shaved
with nowhere to go but where told,
ninety nine soldiers seeing lightning flash
a thousand years ago
Ten thousand Chinese marching on the plains
all turned their heads to Heaven at once to see the Moon.
An old man catching fireflies on the porch at night
watched the Herd Boy cross the Milky Way
to meet the Weaving Girl…
How can we war against that?
How can we war against that?
Morning song, waking from dreams
brown grass, city edge nettle
wild green stinkweed trees
by railroad thru niggertown, carlot, scrapheap
auto slag bridge outskirts,
muddy river’s brown debris
passing Eton Junction
fine rainmist over green fields—
Trees standing upside down
in lush earth approaching Mississippi
green legs waving to clouds,
seed pods exposed to birds & rain bursting,
tree heads drinking in the ground.
Unfold stones like rag dolls & the Astral
body stares with opal eyes,
—all living things before my spectacles.
In the diner, the Lady
“These soldiers so nice, clean faces
and their hair combed so short—
Ugh its disgusting the others
—down to their shoulders & cowboy boots—”
aged husband spooning cantaloupe.
Too late, too late
the Iron Horse hurrying to war,
too late for laments
too late for warning—
I’m a stranger alone in my country again.
Better to find a house in the veldt,
better a finca in Brazil—
Green corn here healthy under sky
& telephone wires carry news as before,
radio bulletins & television images
build War—
American Fighter Comic Books
on coach seat.
Better a house hidden in trees
Mississippi bank
high cliff protected from flood
Better an acre down Big Sur
morning path, ocean shining
first day’s blue world
Better a farm in backland Oregon,
roads near Glacier Peak
Better withdraw from the Newspaper world
Better withdraw from the electric world
Better retire before war cuts my head off,
not like Kabir—
Better to buy a Garden of Love
Better protect the lamb in some valley
screaming President,
Better to stop smoking
Better to stop jerking off in trains
Better to stop seducing white bellied boys
Better to stop publishing Prophecy—
Better to meditate under a tree
Better become a nun in the forest
Better turn flapjacks in Omaha
than be a prophet on the electric Networks—
There’s nothing left for this country but doom
There’s nothing left for this country but death
Their faces are so plain
their thoughts so simple,
their machinery so strong—
Their arms reach out 10,000 miles with lethal gas
Their metaphor so mixed with machinery
No one knows where flesh ends and
the robot Polaris begins—
“Waves of United States jetplanes struck at North Vietnam
again today in the face of…”
Associated Press July 21st—
A summer’s day in Illinois!
Green corn silver watertowers
under the viaduct windowless industry
at track crossing white flowers,
American flowers,
American dirt road, American rail,
American Newspaper War—
in Galesburg, in Galesburg
grocery stove pipes and orange spikeflowers
in backyard lots—TV antennae
spiderweb every poor house
Under a smokestack with a broken lip
magnetic cranes drop iron scrap like waterdrops.
Thirtytwo years ago today, the woman in the red
dress outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago
didn’t wanna be sent back to Rumania.
Ambushed Dillinger fell dead on the sidewalk
hit by 4 bullets
FBI man Purvis quit in ’35—
Feb 29, 1960 he shot & killed himself in his home
Army Colonel in World War II
Breakfast Cereal Manufacturer.
Dillinger’s eyes and Melvin Purvis’—
Dillinger grim, Purvis self-satisfied,
Both died of bullets.
Football field, suburb streets, gray-sheeted clouds
stretched out to the City ahead
Myriad pylons, telegraph poles, a lavender boiler.
Fulbright broadcast attacks war money
Crushed stone mounds, earth eaten
Henry Crown’s & General Dynamics’
dust rising from rubble
Sawdust burners
topped by black cloud—
sulphurous yellow
gas rising from red smokestacks
Power stations netted
with aluminum ladders and ceramic balls
rusty scrapheaps’ cranes
stub chimneys puffing gray air
Coalbarges’ old Holland dusk in a canal,
railroad tracks banded to the city
watertowers’ high legs walking the horizon
The Chinese Foreign Minister makes his pro
nouncement,
Thicker thicker metal
lone bird above phonepole
Thicker thicker smokestack wires
Giant Aztec factories, red brick towers
feeder-noses drooped to railyard
“All human military activity” suspended
says radio—
Campbell’s soups a fortress here,
giant can raised high over Chicago
forest of bridge signs
Church spires lifted gray
hazy towers downtown
a belfried cross beneath
dynamo’d smoke-cathedrals,
The train rolls slower
past cement trucks’
old cabs resting in produce flats
over city streets, rumbling
on a canal’s green mirror
past the blue paint factory,
Thicker thicker the wires
over cast iron buildings, black windows
local bus passing viaduct stanchions
a lone wino staggers down Industrial Thruway
This nation at war
sun yellowing gray clouds,
beast trucks down the
Garage’s bowels—
Bright steam
muscular puffing from an old slue
Meadowgold Butter besmeared with coal dust,
creosote wood bulwarks
Oiltank cars wait their old engine
tracks curve into the city’s heart
windowed hulks downtown
where YMCA beckons the homeless unloved,
the groan of iron tons inching against
whitened rail,
giant train so slowly moved
a man can touch the wheels.
II
Bus outbound from Chicago Greyhound basement
green neon beneath streets Route 94
Giant fire’s orange tongues & black smoke
pouring out that roof,
little gay pie truck passing the wall—
Brick & trees E. London, antique attics
mixed with smokestacks
Apartments apartments square windows set like Moscow
apartments red brick for multimillion population
out where industries raise craned necks
Gas station lights, old old old old traveler
“put a tiger in yr tank—”
Fulbright sang on the Senate floor
Against the President’s Asian War
Chicago’s acrid fumes in the bus
A-1 Outdoor Theatre
’gainst horned factory horizon,
tender steeples ringing Metropolis
Thicker thicker, factories
crowd iron cancer on the city’s throat—
Aethereal roses
distant gas flares
twin flue burning at horizon
Night falling on the bus
steady ear roar
between Chicago and New York
Wanderer, whither next?
See Palenque dream again,
long hair in America,
cut it for Tehuantepec—
Peter’s golden locks grown gray,
quiet meditation in Oaxaca’s
old backyard,
Tonalá or Angel Port warm nights
no telephone, the War
rages North
Police break down the Cross
Crowds screaming in the streets—
on Pacific cliff-edge
Sheri Martinelli’s little house with combs and shells
Since February fear, she saw LSD
Zodiac in earth grass, stood
palm to cheek, scraped her toe
looking aside, & said
“Too disturbed to see you
old friend w/ so much Power”
—ten years later.
Yajalón valley, bougainvillea flares
against the Mayor’s house—
Jack you remember the afternoon
Xochimilco with Fairies?
Green paradise boats
flower laden poled upriver
Pulque in the poop
stringed music in air—
drunkenness, & happiness
anonymous
fellows without care from America—
Now war moves my mind—
Villahermosa full of purple flowers
Merida hath cathedral & cheap hotels
—boat to Isla Cosumel
Julius can wander thru Fijijiapan
forgetting his dog peso Nicotinic Acid—
Bus seat’s white light shines on Mexico map,
quietness, quietness over countryside
palmfrond insects, cactus ganja
& Washington’s Police 5 thousand miles away?
Ray Charles singing from hospital
“Let’s go get stoned.”
Durango-Mazatlán road’s built over
Sierra Madre’s moon valleys now
Children with quartz jewels climbing highway cliff-edge
Jack you bought crystals & beer—
Old houses in Panama City
La Barranca gray canyon under Guadalajara,
Tepic for more candy.
I wanna go out in a car
not leave word where I’m going—
travel ahead.
Or Himalayas in Spring
following the pilgrim’s path
10,000 Hindus
to Shiva temples North
Rishikesh & Laxman Jula
Homage to Shivananda,
the Guru heart—
thru green canyons, Ganges gorge—
carrying a waterpot
to Kedernath & Badrinath
& Gangotri in the ice
—Manasarovar forbidden,
Kailash forbidden,
the Chinese eat Tibet.
Howl for them that suffer broken bone
homeless on moody balconies
Jack’s voice returning to me over & over
with prophecy
“Howl for boys sleeping hungry on tables in cafés with their long hair
to the sea” in Hidalgo de Parral,
Hermosillo & Tetuán—
The masses prepare for war
short haired mad executives
young flops from college
yellow & pink flesh gone mad
listening to radio news.
& Johnson was angry with Fulbright
for criticizing his war.
And Hart Crane’s myth and Whitman’s—
What’ll happen to that?
The Karma
accumulated bombing Vietnam
The Karma bodies napalm-burned
Karma suspicion
where machinery’s smelt the heat of bodies trembling
in the jungle
The Karma of bullets in the back of the head by thatched walls
The Karma of babies in their mothers’ arms
bawling destroyed
The Karma of populations moved from center to center of
Detention
Karma of bribery, Karma blood-money
Must come home to America,
There must be a war
America has builded herself a new body.
Peaceful young men in America get out of the Cities & go to
the countryside & the trees—
Bearded young men in America hide your hair & shave your
beards & disappear
The destroyers are out to destroy—
Destroyers of Peking & Washington stare face to face
& will hurl their Karma-bombs
on the planet.
Get thee to the land,
leave the cities to be destroyed.
Only a miracle appearing in Man’s eyes
only boys’ flesh singing
can show the warless way—
or miracle
Radium destruction over Earth
seed Planet with New Babe.
Brillia
nt green lights
in factory transom windows.
Beautiful!
as eyes close to sleep,
beautiful as undersea sunshine
or valleybottom fern.
Why do I fear these lights?
& smoking chimneys’ Industry?
Why see them less godly
than forest treetrunks
& sunset orange moons?
Why these cranes less Edenly than Palmfronds?
these highway neons unequal in beauty
to violet starfish anemone & kelp
in Point Lobos’
tidepools’ transparency?
It’s these neon Standard Gastation
cars of men whose faces are dough
pockets full of 58 billion dollar
abstract budget money—
these green lights illuminate
goggled eyes fixing blowtorches on metal wings
flying off to war—
Because these electric structures rear tin machines
that will kill Bolivian marchers
or flagellate Vietnam adolescents’ thighs—
Because my countrymen make this structure to make War
Because this smoke over Toledo’s advertised in the Toledo Blade
as energy burning to destroy China.
Baghavan Sri Ramana Maharshi
in his photo has a fine white halo of hair,
thin man with a small beard
silver short-cropped skull-fur
His head tilted to one side,
mild smile, intelligent eyes
“The Jivan-Mukta is not a Person.”
Morning sunrise over Tussie Hills,
earth covered with emerald-dark fur.
Cliffs to climb, a little wilderness,
a little solitude,
and a long valley you could call a home.
Came thru here with Peter before & noticed
green forest,
What a place to walk & look
thru cellular consciousness
—Near Nealyton or Dry Run
Waterfall or Meadow Gap, or Willow Hill.
Sunrays filtering thru clouds like a negative photograph,
smoky bus window, passengers asleep
over Susquehanna River’s morning mist.
Ike at Gettysburg found himself a nice spot—
all these places millions of trees’ work
made green
as millions of workmen’s labor raised the buildings of NY,
Corn here in fields, dollars in the fields of New York.
Morning glow, hills east Harrisburg, bright
highways, red factory smoke, fires burning
upriver in garbage lots—
Philadelphia Inquirer: “Perry County 113 acres
of woodland, $11,300. Ideal locations for
cabins, quarters, township road, springs &
roads on track, best of hunting, call 1-717 …”
—Dangerous to want possessions
and for so short a time.
Shoulda had it in 1945, or ’53,