Last Words

LAST WORDS is the first major collection of poems by a Milwaukee poet born soon after World War II who reached maturity as a poet during the late 1960s. It contains his highly acclaimed epic “Factory,” originally published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in 1980. It was enthusiastically received by a wide range of poets, ecologists, and factory workers.

Antler was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He “worked his way through college” in various factories. As John Muir left the University of Wisconsin at Madison for “the University of the Wilderness” in 1863, Antler left the Milwaukee campus for the same destination in 1973. Besides factories, he has explored wildernesses in Upper Peninsula Michigan, Minnesota, Ontario, Colorado, and California.

“Factory” is only one of his many amazing poems. Poems no less profound for their generous humor. Fugitive lines dashed in factories and leisurely lines breathed into wilderness vistas. Since 1968, poems by Antler have appeared in periodicals ranging from American Poetry Review, City Lights Journal, Kyoto Review, the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, Blake Times, CoEvolution Quarterly, The World, to the Wisconsin Poets Calendar.

“I think Walt passed on his humanity to you, and now you are passing it on to this and future generations.” Gay Wilson Allen, author of THE SOLITARY SINGER: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF WALT WHITMAN

“You chose an important subject, maybe the most important, and what a work of art!” Edward Abbey

Photo credit. Jeff Poniewaz

Cover design by Bill Toth
Book design by Iris Bass
Cover art courtesy of the author
Author photograph by Jeff Poniewaz

An Available Press Book

Copyright © 1986 by Antler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85–91529

ISBN 0-345-32541-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: March 1986

For Jeff Poniewaz
Poet, Inspirer, Camerado

Contents

LAST WORDS

Trying to Remember What I Learned

Iceboat

Rexroth as He Appeared to Exist March 24, 1968 9:00 P.M.

The Last Halloween

Metaphor

For Those Who No Longer Go Ahhh ...

Last Words

Applause

Wrong Number

Tyranny of Images

Lost Sheep

Toward the Definition of a Tree While a Cold Orange Is Rolled on My Forehead

Beyond the Call of Duty

The Smell That Leads the Nose Tingling Back

The Bewilderment of Laughter

Falling Through

FACTORY

FIRST DRINK FROM A STREAM

The Puberty of Smell

Refugee

Grace

The Dark Inside a Life

View from Imp Lake Lookout

Staff

Enskyment

First Drink from a Stream

REWORKING WORK

Rebecca Falls Mescaline Epiphany

Written After Learning Slaves in Ancient Greece and Rome Had 115 Holidays a Year

The Way I Figure It

For the Six Children Brutally Murdered by Their Father, My Cousin’s Child Dead by Disease, and Walt Cieszynski Killed in Carcrash

Factories Are Boxcars Full of Jews

Zero-Hour Day Zero-Day Workweek

Workaholics Anonymous

Dream Job Offer

Why No “Poet Wanted” in Want Ad Column

For the Recognition of the Role of the Poet in Society

“Your Poetry’s No Good Because It Tries to Convey a Message”

Truncheons of Work-Ethic Bludgeoning

Winter Night Can Plant Return

CATCHING THE SUNRISE

Raising My Hand

What the God Says Through Me

This Is the Poet Pipe

Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It!

Alan Watts Dying in His Sleep Elegy

The Hereafter of Laughter

The Earth’s Business

Deathrattles

The Rebirth of My Mouth

The Darkness Within

Making Love to the Dark

Playing Dead Love

Pretending to Be Dead

Bringing Zeus to His Knees

Whitmansexual

Alive! Alive O!

Ejaculation

Playing It by Nose

Aha!

Trees Seen Now

Childfoot Visitation

Chipmunk Crucifixion

Lip-Licking Deer Shitting Meditation

Bedrock Mortar Full Moon Illumination

The Discovery of Lake Michigan

Catching the Sunrise

To All Wilderness Views

After All Is Said and Done

Notes

Index of Titles

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Milwaukee Artists Foundation for a grant to work on the poems in “ReWorking Work.”

Last Words

Trying to Remember What I Learned

Iceboat

Rexroth as He Appeared to Exist March 24,1968 9:00 P.M.

It was as if he were slowly falling asleep, Sitting in that chair, while everyone at the party asked him questions.

Suddenly I wondered if someday I’d become a bard And if, as they asked me questions,

I’d tilt back my head and for a minute or so pretend to doze, eyes peering under lids, And I wondered if then, in that future crowd, There’d be anyone like me who once

couldn’t think of any questions to ask, And couldn’t help but think: how soon

he will be dead

And that’s how he’ll look in the coffin, head back like that with Halley’s Comet hair.

Years from now when I hear the news of his death I’ll remember that night and this poem, Shivering a little as I did then, Surprising myself

with the thought of salmon

shooting up the rapids of his brain, What he was—near as a grosbeak, far as Orion, the sound of mice moving delicately in the walls of his flesh.

The Last Halloween

The last night he was a ghost Doors opened to his touch And slipped bits of flesh Into his pillow case.

Before home he reached down To feel if he received What he desired.

He liked kisses best. They were chewy And stuck to his teeth.

At home on bed he emptied Out his dreams and, slipping The pillow back in its case, Assembled the flesh To the last wrinkled breath Of a rotting man.

He tried on the corpse To see how it would fit.

And answering the door That had been knocked He saw a coffin worn With earth, a tombstone Head, and little leaves For feet.

He was too old To pretend To be anything Else.

Metaphor

Seeing a boy stare in through the glass, The adult magazine store where I’m standing, I know he’s aching for pictures of skin That can make a metaphor of his hand, Thinking of times his house is suddenly empty And rushing her familiar flesh from hiding He can fill his bed with nakedness and dream She touches him softly as a mirror.

And I think of Hypatia,

Lecturer in philosophy at the Alexandrian Museum, Who, though loved by many, remained a virgin. Once, when a student confessed his total love, She, lifting her dress to her waist, said: “What you love is this, And nothing beautiful.” And here stands this boy Who must close his eyes to see A girl more real, more naked Than pictures.

For Those Who No Longer Go Ahhh ...

Not watching the fireworks

I thought how much more beautiful Were the faces illuminated— Some thinking for the first time How like orgasm the explosions, A thought now old to me, Yet for them how much meaning, I knew, I remembered.

Out of our lives forever Hundreds of firework faces. Where they are going Is to the sigh and dissolution After the flashing flower, After the falling petals, Silence looking upward Hoping what’s next is more beautiful.

Last Words

As this girl lay asleep on the beach

An ant crawled up her nose and laid its eggs And when they hatched and ate into her brain She clawed away her face and died screaming. Or that deep-sea diver whose pressurized suit burst Who was squeezed a liquid pulp of flesh Up the air hose onto the deck, A long strand of human spaghetti.

Or that man on a Japanese train killed by the severed leg Of a suicide who jumped from a passing train, A hundred miles an hour through his window.

Or Li Po launching himself like a paper boat toward the moon.

Or Aeschylus strolling along the shore

When an eagle, looking for a stone to crack a turtle’s shell, Spotted his pate gleaming in the sun.

Or that Pompeii boy immortalized in lava.

Or the unearthed coffin, the lid scratched and bloody inside.

Or abandoned by his family, the old Eskimo circled by wolves.

Or Superman no longer-faster than a speeding bullet through his head. Or Santa’s helicopter crashing in a shopping center of expectant children. Or six children trampled to death in Cairo by a mob Rushing to a church where the Virgin had just appeared.

These deaths speak for themselves. They don’t need last words. As for me, I’m not looking into the sky for falling flowerpots. Yet any second sights of a rifle may fix on my brain.

Fourteen humans walked alive that day a perfect stranger By the name of Whitman up in a tower of higher learning Shot them down one by one. Just like that. Dead.

I think of that old man stoned by three children who jeered him out of his house.

If someone told me that’s how I’d die in fifty years I wouldn’t believe it. Did anyone tell the old man?

How will I die? Cleaning a gun with my eyes?

Walking into a mirror? Driving into a tree to avoid a porcupine, my learner’s permit in my pocket?

I know the old philosophies. Yes, I’ve already died in a way. My boyhood and all that. Showers of fingernails and hair. The constant sloughing off of the cells of my body. The death of all the semen that has left me.

My turds, moving to their own bewildered death.

Maybe it’ll be like that first night in San Francisco Waking up to go to the bathroom in Milwaukee, And getting out of my old bed I walk into a new wall. Maybe it’ll be coming up or going down stairs in the dark Thinking there’s one more step when there isn’t Or not one more step when there is.

Will I choke on a bone, or be swallowed by a whale?

Or a death brimming with allusions—

Tugging a book from the tightly packed shelf

I pull my whole bookcase over on me. Or slow death: torture, cancer, leprosy, senility, Or exotic: voodooed, cannibalized, human-sacrificed, devoured by man-eating plant.

Which is worse, being eaten alive or starving to death?

Dying crying for help or begging for mercy?

Yawning as the bomb drops in my mouth, Sneezing in the avalanche zone, Done in by hiccups that can’t be stopped, Boarding the Titanic assured it’s unsinkable, Or like in Stekel, that man who hid under the outhouse seat And disemboweled his wife from beneath with a butcher knife.

I look before sitting.

Or seeing my ultimate vision of absolute beauty

I scream as in horror comics—“AAARRRGGGHHH! ! !” Will I die laughing? Be struck by lightning?

Will I never know what hit me?

Maybe the sky will fall on me.

Maybe the ground’ll just open up under me.

Maybe a gang of boys’ll pour gasoline over me and light me.

Or will it be a case of spontaneous combustion?

Will I be mistaken for a deer during deer season?

Or like Tita Piaz who climbed 9000 feet of sheer rock 300 times with his son strapped to his back, only to die in a fall down his steps?

And when am I going to die? I’d like to know.

I don’t want to get there when the show’s half over.

I don’t want to fall asleep. I’ll have to poke myself.

I don’t want to miss my death the way I missed my birth.

I sit here and plan my last words. I’m going to be prepared.

As in murder mysteries where the victim lies dying

And the hero holds him and says—“Who did it?”

In the same way they’ll gather round me and ask—

“What does this poem mean?”

or “Do you really think that is beautiful?”

And then, like the murdered victim, I’ll mumble far away

Feverishly trying to think of something profound and rising in pitch gasp

“It was It was It was It was ...”

Then slumping back I die.

What will I say? Shall I make fart sounds with my lips?

Should I tell where the treasure’s hidden?

Should I utter Wanbli Galeshfa wana ni he o who e?

My bestfriend’s name?

Or make make-believe deathrattles better than birdlovers warble songs of their favorite birds?

Or should I join the chorus of thousands who shriek “AAAIIIEEE! ! !” or the thousands who simply go “O” or “Ugh” or “Oof’ or “Whoops”

Or should I press finger to lips in the sign of silence?

Not content with ruling the world, Nero, wanting to be its

supreme actor and musician, ordered full houses and awarded himself all the prizes, and while he sang no one could leave, though many pretended to die in order to be carried out as corpses. Shall I say as he did when forced to commit suicide—

“What a great artist the world is losing!”

Or like Rabelais—“Bring down the curtain the farce is finished,” and later as the priests surrounded him, he, with a straight face, sighed— “I go to seek a great perhaps.”

Or like the Comtesse de Vercelles, according to Rousseau—

“In the agonies of death she broke wind loudly. ‘Good!’

she said, ‘A woman who can fart is not yet dead.’ I

Or like Saint Boniface as boiling lead was poured down his throat—

“I thank thee Lord Jesus, Son of the Living God!”

Or Saint Lawrence, broiled on a gridiron—“This side is done now, turn me over.”

Or Emily Dickinson—“I must go in, the fog is rising.”

Or Beddoes—“I ought to have been among other things

a good poet.”

Or Lindsay, full of lysol—“They tried to get me ...

I got them first.”

Or Socrates—“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius, will you remember to pay the debt?”

Or Chopin—“Swear to make them cut me open

so I won’t be buried alive.”

Or Scriabin, his face engulfed in gangrene—

“Suffering is necessary.”

Or Marie Antoinette, having stepped on the executioner’s foot—

“I beg your pardon.”

Or Huey Long—“I wonder why he shot me?”

Or Millard Fillmore—“The nourishment is palatable.”

Or P. T. Barnum—“How were the receipts today

in Madison Square Garden?”

Or Carl Panzarm, slayer of 23 persons—“I wish the whole human race had one neck and I had my hands around it.”

Or Jean Barre, 19, guillotined for mutilating a crucifix— “I never thought they’d put a gentleman to death for committing such a trifle.”

Or da Vinci—“I have offended God and man because my work wasn’t good enough.”

Or Vanzetti—“I am innocent.”

Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, striking the ground with one fist— “I come, I come, why do you call for me?”

W. Palmer, stepping off the gallows—“Are you sure it’s safe?” Metchnikoff the bacteriologist—“Look in my intestines carefully for I think there is something there now.”

John Wilkes Booth—“Tell my mother I died for my country.”

Dylan Thomas—“I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”

Dutch Schultz—“French Canadian bean soup!”

Byron—“I want to go to sleep now.”

Joyce—“Does nobody understand?”

Must I be the scribe of each word I speak, never knowing if it will be my last?

Or should someone else be my full-time scribe

(in case deathfits keep me from writing them down)

Always ready to put ear to my lips in case it should be a whisper?

“Rosebud.” “More weight.” “More light.”

“Now it is come.” “Now I die.” “So this is death?”

“Thank you.” “Farewell!” “Hurrah!” “Boo!”

“Can this last long?” “It is finished.”

Or like H. G. Wells—“I’m alright. Go away.”

Or like Sam Goldwyn—“I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

Or like John Wolcott when asked if anything could be done for him— “Bring back my youth.”

I tell myself what my last words will be, Hoping I don’t get stage fright.

Hoping I don’t get laryngitis.

Hoping someone will hear them.

Hoping I’m not interrupted.

Hoping I don’t forget what they are.

From now on everything I say and write Are my last words.

Applause

Striking the palms of hands together, quick smart blows, producing abrupt sharp sounds, expresses their satisfaction.

After the performance, they do this.

It is called clapping. I sit and observe, that my actions will not be improper.

Am I allowed to do this? Softly at first, I begin, scared the man next to me may growl— “Quiet! Don’t you know this is for us to do? Children should be seen not heard. Grow up!”

Am I a grown up? I’ve made up my mind.

But how should I hold my hands?

Up to my breast, or down by my genitals?

Cupped and weak, or flat and firm?

Elbows flush with my sides, or flaring?

Should one hand be still (which one?) and be slapped by the other?

Or should I take wide strokes with both as if trying to take off, or pull invisible taffy?

What’s the rhythm, rapid or slow?

Do I pat daintily with nose in the air?

Or hard like pounding a nail in?

I’m not used to hitting myself.

Ladies flowing in minks (little stuffed heads with black plastic eyes staring from breasts) tap their programs on purses.

They’ve squinted at them throughout the performance, rustling the pages, fanning their faces.

As they leave they forget them.

How many came to hear the music?

How many secretly hoped the performer would make a mistake or forget the piece halfway through?

How many nodded off digesting their dinners, or peered sideways searching for someone attractive?

Where are those who disappeared during intermission?

I think of cabbages and tomatoes hurled on stages of yore.

I think of orgious ovations lasting three hours.

Why at the end of a symphony doesn’t the audience carry the players off on their shoulders like fans pouring onto the field after a victory?

Hugo’s Hemani, on opening night

the audience burned down the theater and tried lynching the actors.

On “Queen for a Day” mothers broke down competing at misery, while the applause-o-meter leapt to crown the champion of disasters.

Are they afraid not to clap?

They don’t need idiot cards.

After the most passionate music they clap loudest.

They know how to break the spell.

Is the sound of their clapping more beautiful than the music?

Why don’t they clap through the entire performance?

After all, who’s really performing?

What does the virtuoso think when at the last note—cough, cough, and then the avalanche of praise?

Does he listen to the textures of thousands of fingers?

Does he go into the audience asking for autographs?

Does he lob rotten eggs at the box seats?

Does he clap for himself?

He’s seen the seals at the zoo.

If the audience really appreciates beauty why don’t they scream for hours, clapping till their hands get so hot they melt off and they clap faster and faster with their feet and they drop off and they clap their limbs, teeth, gums, intestines and genitals till all that’s left is a huge arena of smoking dismembered bodies?

I’m waiting for the time when no one claps.

Paralyzed in silent epiphany. Hands frozen in prayer.

Who claps for lightning?

Who claps for the bowel movement?

After apocalyptic orgasm who claps?

Who claps at a great man’s death?

How many are virtuosos of their lives?

People were applauding when Lincoln was shot.

When Jesus was crucified who applauded?

Who stood and demanded an encore?

What kind of ovation did he get?

Blake saw his brother’s soul rise through the ceiling to heaven, clapping.

Coffin lids clap only once.

If we must clap, why can’t it be in soundless slow-motion like a butterfly drying its wings?

I clap with my eyes.

My heart claps with one hand.

When I think of my death do I imagine my favorite symphony rising to climax and I, maestro at the finale, collapsing with romantic gesture, audience filing out silent with heads bowed?

Beethoven at the premiere of his Ninth, stone deaf, conducting the last time in his life— when it was over, he, being several measures off, kept waving his arms during the deafening roar.

Audience and performer are gone now, and I’m still sitting. Clapping. I’ve learned how. I’ll always clap last so I add to the total performance.

My art is small, yet heard after all.

Do you think I stay home nights to practice my clapping?

Or am I designing concert halls with pillories for hands?

Am I just one of the audience who couldn’t go home without finding what he lost:

a wallet, a scarf, a key, the program on which I jotted notes for this poem?

Once at a reading I deliberately clapped after a lousy poem. Soon the whole room was earthquaking claps: Clap. CLAP.CLAP. CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!

CLAP! !CLAP! !CLAP! !CLAP! !

Do you think I like applause after this poem or any poem? Do you think I love the silence after my voice has stopped? Yet I’ve heard the refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice.

Each clap stings like the challenge to a duel.

The clock’s hands clap as I grow old.

The typewriter claps as I write this.

Can clapping ever be the same?

After reading this will I hear only breathing?

After writing this will I sit here and clap loud and long?

Wrong Number

Who is this? Who is this?

No answer.

Sound of sea from shell.

Long breakers of silence.

Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?

No answer.

Sound of submarine propellers.

Sound of muffled beehives.

When the phone rings and you answer and nothing but silence greets you

And each hello you say louder the silence that follows deepens,

And when you yell “Who are you?

Why don’t you say something?”

And the other end says nothing, why hang up with a bang When you can listen to them listening, or read them this poem?

Anytime you lift the receiver

You could hear panting or moaning or maniac cackling

Or the low voice—“I’m gonna strangle ya tonight!” Click.

Or—“As you hear me a long needle is shooting from the earpiece into your brain!” Click.

Or call after call—“Is Jim there?”

Finally the same voice calls—“This is Jim

have there been any calls for me?” Click.

Or after guessing the largest state—“That’s right!

You win a thousand soggy cigar butts!” Click.

All the numbers in the phonebook are at our fingertips.

Anything we want to say we can say and hang up and never be traced.

Hundreds of men phoning hundreds of women at random to passionately detail their desires.

How many listen? How many girls make erotic phonecalls? I’m still waiting.

Why don’t I get calls saying—“I’m young. I’m beautiful.

I want to know you.”

If you’re as beautiful as your voice come right over!

How close we must be already, our lips at each other’s ear.

I’ve dialed ears with my tongue trying to get through to genitals.

I’ve dialed each voice on the telephones of the body for weather predictions, inspirational messages, information, the correct time.

I wanted to squeeze through the wires like fireflies!

How often I dashed down rollerskate stairs finding no one there but the dial tone.

Mattresses speaking.

Hello, mattresses? Could you please connect me with pogo sticks?

Sorry, this is toilet floats not artificial larynxes.

No, this is toupees not tepees.

Sorry, this is the morgue not birth certificates.

The boy voice hears me say—“Hello?”

“Hello,” it says, “is this the insane asylum?”

My breath moistens the mouthpiece—“I’m sorry you must have the wrong ...” Click.

Sound of icc against keel. A record of deathrattles.

I dial 0.

Operator, could you please tell me who I am?

Hello, she says, I have some bad news: your father just died.

Death, I should’ve known you were never too busy to be reached in an emergency to scream the soft ambulances of sleep.

When will you call collect long distance person to person through transoceanic cables of my flesh, your voice breaking through my heart’s busy signal?

Death, I’m warning you! Poets listen in on extensions.

They want to make a living tapping you

Saying things like “Maggots connect us to Cosmic Switchboard,” or “Embalming robs our graves of telephones,” or “The piece of steak on our fork says— ‘Guess who this is?’ ”

Death, why must you go on and on like this?

My ear’s turning into a cauliflower.

Don’t you get tired of shooting the breeze?

Must I knock on the wall and say—“I have to let you go someone’s at the door”

Or smash GOODBYE in your coffin ear?

Later, I’ll know your call by the ring of thunder and I’ll ease a cloud down to hear your delicate nuzzlers chew into my listening.

Holding this paper to my ear is the line dead?

Is someone dying, gasping on the floor, my voice tingling in their hand?

Is writing this like dialing any number at random to sob I just have to talk to one human being to tell my life my words tottering tightrope walkers into your ears and then after an hour’s lost world pretend to be choking— the poison ... it’s beginning to tvor\ .. — can’t breathe ...

click, hello? Hello? and you know the rest of your life you could’ve saved me?

My eyes ring. It’s this poem again. It wants more images.

Maybe I’m really only interested in calling myself.

But the line’s always busy. Who could be talking so long to me?

A hearse pulls up the drive. They say they’ve come for my body. Some boy must be pulling a prank.

In the nursing home I count the telephone poles that fly past my window, taking messages I forgot for my mother.

Sound of wind over frozen explorers.

Sound of buzz-sawed trees.

Windows are rattling.

Everything is rattling its receivers.

How can I answer them all?

So old I forget who is calling?

And the pillow listens to a shell

Washed up in someone’s dream.

What creature lived in here?

Is this the call I’ve waited for all my life?

I try to decide should I answer.

I worry it might be the wrong number.

If I lift the receiver I’m afraid

I might say goodbye.

Tyranny of Images

Pilgrims to Mecca burned out their eyes with hot irons saying nothing more beautiful could be seen and therefore would see nothing more.

Everywhere I look hot irons brandish to blind me to ecstasy.

I cannot stop seeing.

I have elephantiasis of beauty, must carry my eyes in a wheelbarrow.

Images besiege me. Images enslave me.

They erect me in front of beauty firing squads and pump me with epiphany bullets.

They stick fingers down my throat so I vomit and eat more.

They force me to say what I don’t want to say.

I try to say love, turd comes out.

I try to say turd, God comes out.

They dangle me from nooses of insight and wonder.

They draw and quarter me with fascination.

There is no armor against this onslaught.

I leak. Images gush in. There are never enough watertight compartments.

In the vast whirlpool each object sucks the poet who struggles to surface speaking in bubbles.

Volvox! Gnomon! Baleen! Uvula! Aureole! Catkins! Stomata! each worthy of millions of poems!

Rosin! Gristle! Synapse! Boomerang! Orangutan! Dishrags! Watchfobs! Ultra-Rilkean Double-dildoes!

Someday whole libraries of poems on licking nipples!

Someday poets who only write about potatoes,

or only about arroyos or fumaroles or rhododendrons, Or katydids or caryatids or kangaroo pouches or bellybuttons! Someday oceans of poems on oceans!

Someday mountains of poems on mountains!

And more poems on pinheads than angels!

More poems on snowflakes than I can ever read, no two identical!

Paeans on perineums! Epics on epiglottis!

Eclogues on undulating fields of villi!

Sagas on sequoias and mayflies!

Concordances of xylem and phloem!

Each leaf that falls shall have its elegy!

Each grain of sand its laureate!

What hundred things should I liken lichen to?

Objects in this room (more here to write than hundred lifetimes)

Hurtle themselves at me!

Like bats in my hair! Like mosquitos at bedtime!

Moths, dazzled, thinking me a candle!

Lemmings marching onto me thinking I’m the sea!

Images wriggle on hooks to see which one will fry me in its poem.

They stick guns in my ribs and say—“Reach for the sky!”

My ears are deeper than holes in space.

My nose smells Thanksgiving on other planets.

My eyes are the most powerful telescopes and microscopes.

Girls don’t realize I’m their vagina and their gentle finger.

Boys don’t realize I’m their cock and fist slippery with their own saliva.

All the turds in the world past and present, believing me Sewer God, they creep toward me.

How can I help but dive on the grenade embracing the joyous hot leaves of shrapnel?

I’m embedded in euphoric lava.

I unleash my brain and let it wander from my body and when it returns it sniffs and urinates golden on my imagination.

I’m huddled in a tent, starving, freezing, trying to be the first to the pole, as glaciers I wrote years ago ponder by, scribbling the last entry in the diary of my flesh.

My mind’s an orgy in a hall of mirrors.

How can anyone not be poet?

How can anyone say everything’s been said, or there’s nothing to write about?

Each place, object, creature, experience, relationship

is waiting for poets

to plant their flags on its continent.

Quetico! Geode! Jack-in-the-Pulpit!

Muskelunge! Dragonfly! Ruby-crowned Kinglet!

Rivulet! Goosebumps! Vernix! Syzygy!

Coprolite! Ichnolite! Fulgurite! Foghorn!

Equinox! Alpenglow! Embryos! Rainbows!

Blowjobs! Why has no poet devoted himself to you?

If I were to write only of you how much I could say!

And to think no poet has found it impossible

to write anything but odes to Fucking!

What Poetry could say about Orgasm

would take more than all Bibles together!

O why am I not continually writing poems

being so awed and sensitive to consciousness of life?

Why isn’t everyone writing fast as they can a pen in each hand, foot, mouth, and anus scribbling simultaneous?

Why aren’t there blizzards of poems?

The earth deluged with poems rising like white skyscrapers overhead!

No time to go back and read what I write or anyone’s written!

Impossible to read in a hundred years all that’s writ in a minute!

Bees enveloping the beekeeper.

Worlds pouring from the gumball machine till the Earth disappears.

This poem does not want to end.

It expects me to keep writing till I drop dead

And another must take the pen from my hand

and keep on going where I left off

till they drop dead

And another must take up the pen, on and on.

The millions of poems within me more beautiful than I’ll ever write are ready.

They know who can’t close his eyes without hearing opening cocoons.

They know who wears rearview mirrors on his head as he writes to catch images sneaking up on him.

They know who is surrounded by so many poems it will take a whole life to find his way out.

The clouds go by. Do I need to say what they look like?

Do I need to say anything?

I dream the clouds are poems I wrote when I was God, paper from which the words could only fall.

I’ve become too many things. It’s easy, too easy.

Now I begin to feel poets should wait, wait when images subtly tumesce their minds, not touch themselves,

Till five minutes before death, and then as simple and direct as possible scrawl their one and only poem.

I cannot do this. I was born too soon.

But there are temporary exits from this stage and I know an image can be my trapdoor:

I perform the Indian Rope Trick on myself.

My phallus rises. I climb its sensual rungs and disappear amid the thunder and the clouds.

Lost Sheep

Trying to fall asleep an idea for a poem kept me awake.

Too tired to jot it down

I put myself to sleep repeating it.

In the morning I woke remembering I’d remember what I forgot.

Toward the Definition of a Tree

While a Cold Orange Is Rolled on My Forehead

If I were to show you two hands

joined by a wrist— One hand reaching into sky, One hand reaching into earth, both stretching like a tug of war when neither side budges, Would you say—“What a way to pray!” Or “When’ll they learn to shake hands?” Or “That’s not what I see.

I see fireworks shooting out either end of a baton.”

And if you were to show me twins joined at the feet smirking—“So there!” Would I say—“How can they walk unless as one walks on his feet the other walks on his hands?”

Or “Stand on your hands on a mirror and look how your reflection holds you up like an acrobat.”

Or “All you’re saying is

how much of the iceberg we can’t see.”

Beyond the Call of Duty

At the general swim the campers stood silent staring into the pool. “A turd!” I yelled. “Some camper laid a turd during last night’s swim! No one’s going in till that comes out.

Who’s going in to get it?”

Sound of showers dripping. Blue jays in the white pines. The boys looked down and shivered.

Putting my megaphone down I volunteered, chest out, poised from the lifeguard chair. “Watch me!”

Into turquoise I swanned beneath muted cheers, bubbles trailing my cheeks as I swam toward the brown thing on the bottom.

Then clutching the long rigid lump and rising

I splashed all smiles into air and opening my mouth took a big chaw on the candy bar

I threw there that morning.

The Smell That Leads the Nose Tingling Back

Walking through Camp one night I discovered on the familiar path a fresh turd.

Among leaves and moonlight the sleek dropping lay, wisps of steam wavering in the cool.

Remembering the campfire hush when shadows, sparks, smoke and dying coals made horror come alive, I wondered how one boy after all the rest were sleeping dared sneak through pines and screams of twigs to squat and tremble, the solid flame melting loose and slipping free, the grunted sigh and shiver.

In the morning everyone saw it.

Walking to breakfast I heard them joking, accusing each other, and wondered which boy who laughed was the one who rose from that place and ran back through the woods to sleep, ran back alone under stars.

The Bewilderment of Laughter

A boy and girl walk past you laughing, And because they’re laughing and you’re not, And because you don’t know why they’re laughing, it’s as if they’re laughing at you, Even if they’re not, Even if they’re laughing so hard they don’t even notice you as they pass, And so walking alone becomes walking lonely, For no matter how many friends you have A boy and girl will walk past you laughing sometime when you’re alone,

And because what’s loneliest in you will hear them, The sound of their laughter will haunt you long after they’re gone.

So when old men slip and laugh as they fall you ask them to be your teachers, To teach you where Christ laughs in the gospels— A laugh that makes others laugh, a funny laugh, a contagious laugh,

A laugh impossible to hold back, a wild laugh, a consoling laugh, A laugh more profound than prayer or parable, a believable laugh,

A laugh that unfolds like a head of lettuce, a fresh green laugh,

A laugh that makes heaven without laughing unthinkable, A laugh that curls lips back not to bare fangs to scare rivals, A laugh that spreads in ripples till it’s lapping round the world, A laugh only had it been recorded slaughter would never have the word laughter in it and no one would ever abominate the merriment of worms.

But nowhere in scripture does it say “Christ laughed.”

Nowhere does he split a gut!

Nowhere does he summersault and cartwheel hooray!

Nowhere does he hug himself laughing himself hoarse!

Nowhere does he jump-up-and-down-laugh-his-ass-off-whoopee!

Nowhere does he spend 40 days and nights in omnipotent conniptions!

Nowhere does he give immortality to fun or the bliss of glee or teach a Lord’s Prayer full of wisecracks!

And where is he giddy or silly?

And where is he drunken with laughter?

And where does he fracture his funnybone?

And where does he wear jester shoes with curled toes and little bells? O point out the chapter and verse of his slapstick slaphappy laughter! Where does he tell how the man without a jaw laughs?

Where does he say the reason we bury corpses

is so they don’t get funny?

Why didn’t he make making fart sounds under armpits his disciples?

Why isn’t giggling while hiding playing hide’n’seek in the twilight a beatitude?

Why isn’t baptism epilepsies of laughter?

Wouldn’t everything be different if just once the Son of God had bent over and cracked a smile?

Was Christ only pulling our leg about eternal damnation?

(Heaven really only for atheists and heathens?)

When the nails were pounded in

did no one see the twinkle in his eye?

Did no one but me hear the jokes he told from the cross?

Don’t you think he got a kick out of sticking his finger through the holes in his hands?

Don’t you think he ever chuckled to himself as he walked alone?

Our way of laughing grows older as we do:

For some of us it dies before our funeral—

Suddenly we hear ourselves laughing like someone who will never be an actor,

And we realize years ago we didn’t like people who laughed like that.

So we listen to recordings never made

of laughter bubbling from our mouths

five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five birthdays old, Remembering uncontrollable laughter possessing us

till it hurt so much we laughed even harder, wetting our pants from laughing so hard, laughing until we cried....

And so we start repeating the word death over and over, Death with the word eat in it that will eat us, Death that’s not sorry we tamed our laugh

so we can turn it on and off like a lightswitch,

Death that sheds no tears we busted our laughingfit buckingbronco, Death that does not care if we think death is no laughing matter, Death that does not say death is the punchline, Death that does not say death has the last laugh, Death that’s never been Christ’s flunky or yes-man,

Death that doesn’t give a damn if Christ died laughing or cursing, Death that doesn’t consider Christ getting a boner on the cross a blasphemy, Death that doesn’t have to swear on a stack of Bibles

to tell the Truth,

Death that doesn’t give a hoot if we believe no matter how we live if we can make God laugh we are saved,

Death we want to believe will touch us like our mother, like the mother who consoles her child when other children point and laugh,

Death with its skull that never stops grinning the grin that never stops touching our face from the inside,

And babies may cry when they’re born

but their skulls have been grinning long before and don’t need a university to learn how,

And how a blind man feels when everyone’s laughing and he can’t see what’s so funny,

And how this all brings us back to the boy and the girl, How they walk toward us and past us laughing or from behind us and past us laughing

And walking lonely not laughing we wish we could join them, wish we could fill our mouths with those jubilees.

II

All I’ve done is fill my mouth with words.

I’ve composed haikus to monkeyshines and odes to shenanigans.

I’ve authored the epic of tee-heeing on tip-toe.

I’ve dissertationed the definitive text of ticklishness.

I’ve sent humoresque smokesignals from the ancient peaks.

I am the scholar of winks and the archeologist of guffaws.

I’ve traced the word for laugh in every language back to the sun.

The giggling of Neanderthal children in caves during the sacred ritual still reaches my ears.

I hear laughter of rolling down hills and leaping off sand dunes.

I hear laughter of fathers running with sons laughing piggyback on their shoulders.

I hear laughter of mothers holding daughters by hands and going in a circle so fast the little girls fly around in the air.

Yet where is the deep spontaneous laugh I haven’t laughed in years?

My primal laugh, my inexhaustible laugh?

The laugh in which all of me laughs, not just my mouth?

O how many fatted calves would I kill if my laugh that was lost was found?

Will I never again feel the thrill breaking up in church so the whole pew shakes with wrestled-back gags of laughter?

Will all the times I imitated laughter of morons and opera singers never return the way it made all my friends laugh?

And the laughter of my sixth grade class

when the teacher didn’t see my raised hand

and I ran up to tell her I felt sick

and before I could say a word

vomited on her dress

to become laughingstock of the school for weeks, Can’t I look back on it now and laugh?

I feel like a stone face that’s frowned for 5000 years!

Must I wait for all the faces I made in the mirror to become my face before delighting in a single cackle?

If there is one laugh worth all the laughs you have left,

take it now,

And after that thigh-slapping, floor-rolling binge

You won’t have to ask—“How long have deformities and deathcamps been God’s court jester?”

You’ll know why children draw the sun with a smiling face.

You’ll understand how maniacs can laugh for hours.

You’ll know what lies behind the laughter of peekaboo

and ring-around-the-rosy,

And the laughter of girls in junior high showerrooms,

And the laughter of boys pretending to get dirty jokes,

And the toothless laughter of nursing homes,

The laugh of those finding out they have one month to live,

The laugh of the waterskier rising in bubbles

as he rises to surface into the returning propeller,

The laugh of dolls you pull the string from their backs and they laugh, The laugh of the rapist or strangler who has cornered his victim, The laughter of men who make a living poisoning the earth

and don’t feel guilty,

The laughter of crowds at public tortures and executions,

the laughter of the guillotined head,

And the hermit who hasn’t seen a human in thirty years

listening to the echo of his laugh across the valley,

And the laughter of siamese twins joined at the mouth,

The laughter of the man the Sioux buried up to his head smeared with honey near an anthill, Laughter of ants, laughter of anteaters, Laughter of monkeys and laughing hyenas, Laughter of aspen and weeping willow, Laughter of lizards and lampreys and clams, Laughter of whales and amoebas, Laughter of volcanoes and earthquakes, Laughter of exploding stars, Laughter of earthlings ogling Earth from the moon, Laughter of the crescent moon’s smile, Laughter of other planets, The laugh of those who scorn poetry, The laugh of those deaf since birth, Obnoxious laugh of those who laugh too loud and long, Nervous laugh of the inexperienced teacher, Derisive laugh of the perverted embalmer, And those who laugh in the face of death, And those who laugh bad breath in your face, And those who laugh at their own bad jokes, And those who laugh behind laughing masks, And those who laugh through their nose, And those who laugh while they cry inside, And those who dimple at the dimpling of buttocks, And those who double up at the bullfrog’s croak, And those whose job is turning people into pretzels of laughter, And the man in stitches who splits into stitches— All the gales of laughter, all the tons of laughs, all the laughs in the world you will understand.

For as long as you stand under the waterfall of all the laughs of your life in an instant

How can you be sad? How can you be lonely knowing a trillion years is only a second in Eternity?

And looking through a telescope large as our galaxy with an eye big as the sun

Why be unhappy because you can see no more of Infinity than an infinitesimal crumb?

Someday you could find yourself when the bird sings in the forest Listening like the bird to its own overflowing song, About to discover you can sing without words or the lilt of some tune,

That tossing your head back it would rise and you’d let it, your laugh, The way you laughed as a child, your tears, the way they loved coming from joy, Your laughter, your tears, together— HO spelled backwards OH, HA spelled backwards AH—

And the bird listening as you are to both of your songs.

Falling Through

On his back, hands behind head, the cloud gazes down at me wondering what I look like. He breathes deep, yawns, stretches against the sky, and feeling the warm wind surround him like dreams, he wishes he could lie against the sky forever.

It looks like … that could be legs, those could be arms, and that might be a head ... It looks Hk^{e a} hoy, a man, a cloud?

But the cloud tires of searching for words. He’d rather just lie in the sun listening to himself breathe.

As the sun sets, the cloud turns colors, shivers, blows a sprig of lightning from between his teeth. He looks down at me and knows I’m a mist of flesh on dust. Soon, he thinks, it will be drizzling, and there will be soft thunder. Dozing off, the cloud sighs: It looks like ... a pillow ... a bed? I wonder if I could lie down on that body without falling through, and sleep as it drifted across the earth.

By night the sky was cloudless, and the field was quiet with fog.

Factory

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

First Drink from a Stream

The Puberty of Smell

If the second before pulling the trigger you remember me, remember me smelling lilacs,

How every time smelling lilacs I remember The time my mescalined olfactory system caught on the early morning breeze the full-blossomed and blossoming lilacs at Big Smoky Falls,

How my nose approached like a boy discovering his cock feels so good he can’t help crying out,

How circling the tree at nose level caressing with my nose those purple clouds of fragrance

I experienced where I smell inside my skull above my mouth and under my eyes in the very center my nose’s first orgasm,

Not caring if anyone saw my abandon— Though no one was there, no one but birds and songs the sun rises in them and the falls and the song of the falls and the song of mosquitos

I gave my blood to with joy— And even if I didn’t think then of the scent between pubescent legs, Or remember my boyhood cock no longer exists to caress breasts of early morning dreams, I saw them opening, all opening and opening themselves

And glowing in the sun’s first rays, lifting themselves to the sun in the just-felt breeze

As if they’d waited,

As if everything in the Universe had waited

Till I came, till I could smell them opening, my nose caressed by those blossoms, those lilacs, those clusters of fragrance and the living color called purple,

As I opened and closed my eyes with my breathing, Every so often remembering where I was, Remembering I had a face and that face had a nose— for didn’t it seem to me then all I was was that smell?

Jim—

Even if you’ve already killed yourself,

When the time comes you have my name and I have yours, write this for me,

Or when next you’re about to pull the trigger, Remember in that second before you discover if you can hear the shot

That for a few grains of the hourglass this was me—

That I too had no choice, drawn by the smell irresistible, My nose approaching like the lover who believes no one on earth can love more passionately—

Remember me then smelling so hard

As if I were the first to aroma

this peculiar translation of corpses,

As if I were the first to make love to lilacs,

As if I were entering strange houses of early morning drawn toward sleeping boys to hold lilac sprigs to nostrils of their dreams,

As if I’d discovered the answer

to all the questions the Universe inside my skull could ask.

And so, in the second before you blow out your brain, when you look into the gun and feel where the hole in your head will be, Remember you were immortal before you were born, that even before this poem your suicide must be fragrant as lilacs, And always remember in that morning the color of lilacs, How I smelled them till I could smell them no more, withdrawing, fulfilled and wondering

If you went to those lilacs at Big Smoky Falls you’d be surprised they had no smell because I must’ve inhaled it all,

Wondering if I’d smelled those purple clouds so well if you inhaled from my nose you could smell them now.

Refugee

Remember, poets, when you wage a poem against war, you need paper,

Trees must be cut by slaves, trucked by slaves, pulped and sold by slaves for the green paper that enslaves us all, And under your pen the paper struggles to escape, not wanting to be cut down again.

It knows it can’t help break the silence with whatever you force it to confess.

And don’t forget the war poets wage against each other, At readings how many hope their poems will defeat the poems of the others?

And published in magazines, each poem a medal, a promotion, a notch on the barrel.

The waking student, who cares more for who turns to him in bed than anything, glances at your works, sure he can remember the name, the passwords,

This one means this, that that....

Soon the young will have to memorize the names and dates of this war.

After the murder of one hundred million in less than one hundred years

What do we desire? Peace?

There are so many wars, I think each of them is a word in the dictionary.

There are so many wars, I think each of them is a human being.

On tombstones I read the dates of the wars.

I want to get so far away war can cease to exist as long as I live.

I want to hide somewhere in the mountains for fifty years, and then, but for one day only, come back and find everything

Changed, for better or worse, but knowing I will never return again.

Grace

When you no longer thank God for flesh set before you, When not even silence preludes the toil of jaws, Or when eating alone you turn on the radio because the noise your face makes makes you uncomfortable,

You could be graced with a vision that comes like the visions that come to those who’ve chosen to eat only their hunger.

And if then you say we should kill what we eat, kill what we eat so we know who to thank hearing cries butchered animals make,

So we can point out on our own bodies where this meat comes from,

I’d say: It’s not enough to become the one who hammers cow brains or stickles upsidedown pigs, Not enough to eat from china designed with pictures of slaughterhouse,

Not even enough to know why Chippewa cut open just-killed doe to partake the fresh excrement,

Or how Sioux boys kissed the first fish throwing him back to tell the rest it was alright because they asked to be forgiven,

Or that “We can’t live without killing” can’t be said too many times, Or that to count out loud the number of lambs gone to the supermarket during the last war would take longer than we have to live,

Or that garbage from all the suppers of one day in America would stem the hungers that have cried for so long they’ve lost their voice.

None of this is enough. A God has said we must kill with our mouth,

Our eyes must be that close to what makes us survive, what keeps our lips worthy of the long kisses in which the tongue passes along the edges of a girl’s teeth.

The Dark Inside a Life

To learn how to die cut down a tree, Watch how so many years fall.

You don’t need to have planted it for it to be your life.

You know countless trees have grown and will grow where this tree falls.

Everyone alive now will be underground

and will have gone from roots, branches and leaves to roots, branches and leaves many times.

You’ve seen how the seed of a tree can rise from the pit of a stump.

Wherever your feet touch earth

you know you are touching where something has died or been born.

Count the rings and stand on the stump and stretch your arms

to the sky.

Think only because it was cut down could you do this. You are standing where no one has stood

but the dark inside a life that many years.

View from Imp Lake Lookout

Before taking Mescaline at Imp Lake

I drove up the dirt road to the lookout the map told me was there To find only the platform where it stood remained, And standing where the tower once stood, looking up being my view,

It seemed the lifetime of the tower and the tower’s view and all the feet that ever climbed the winding stairs to the top imagined me then:

The ranger deciding here was the spot for the tower,

The tower in the architect’s brain, the factory fashioning its parts, The shipment of parts, the making of the forest road and the Tower signpost and parkinglot and path from parkinglot to the tower’s base,

And the tower’s construction, the unfolding blueprint, trees falling, girders rising, putting in the steps, securing the viewing platform, the foreman’s final OK, machinery and workers driving away, the money it cost changing hands, the silence returning once more,

And all the feet that climbed the lifespan of the tower— how many years how many footsteps echoing upward toward the vista expanding in every direction each footstep up the number of steps upward 50, 100, 150, 200 feet high,

Dawn, noon, dusk, night, spring, summer, fall, winter, the continual autobiography of the sky—

Babies carried up in their mothers’ arms, Children who can climb only one step at a time, Girls two steps at a time racing friends to the top nonstop giggling out-of-breath,

Boys on top holding the gobbing contest or the pissing contest or balancing on guard rails on a dare,

Fathers yelling at kids to be careful,

Those afraid to go all the way up,

Those too old reading “Climb at your own risk” who climb up anyway,

Those gone to the top for blowjob in moonlight, or fucking in sunrise,

Those curious what makes pretending to throw each other off so much fun,

Epileptics, amputees, morons, deformed persons, those who are blind, and fetuses umbilicusing the view from their mothers’ eyes, Those blindfolded by friends, not told where they’re going, led to the top and the blindfold unpinned,

And those who looked from the top but never really saw the view, All walks of life walking upward, all different outlooks looking out, All the occupations in the yellow pages rising above the trees and the dream of the job that’s living on a tower and looking for fires rising with them,

And those lamenting the extinction of crow’s-nests, lighthouses and lookout towers,

And the one wondering if someday the tower will stand surrounded by rushhour megapolis (quaint reminder of Upper Michigan wilds extant in the shadow of highrise apartments), And the one wondering how long to stay on top because friends are restless and want to move on, And the one who believes himself unworthy to go up till all the woods seen from the view have walked through him, And don’t forget the one who goes up to see what the forest that’ll take Mescaline in him looks like to a hovering bird, And don’t forget Mescaline climbing the tower in the shape of a human being,

And don’t forget Mescaline climbing steps of epiphany in the human brain,

And connoisseurs of wilderness towers

who pilgrimage from towertop to towertop, Those who like being noisy on top, Those to whom even a whisper is sacrilege,

And all who returned again and again,

Who climbed these winding stairs each year of their life, Who became friends with the view

and gloried in the possibilities of Tower— Sunrise on top, Sunset on top, star study, cloud study, bird study on top, Thanksgiving on top, kite flying on top, milkweedpods, waterballoons, soapbubbles on top, snowmen on top, trampoline on top, tai chi or yoga or Auschwitz photos on top, flute or harp or helicoptered piano on top, photography on top, topography on top, Mescaline on top, soliloquy on top, suicide on top, jacking off on top in berserk thunderstorm, Shouting your name loud as you can from cupped hands and cupping your ears for an echo, Learning the view by heart, Dancing the view turning in circles fast as you can, Scribbling “inexhaustible view” in your notebook

or “the vista that invites the eye into its distance”

or “the panorama expanding before me further than I can see,” Dropping a boulder from on top close as possible

to your friend’s head as he lies on the ground watching it fall to savor the shock of his body hitting the ground if he jumped, Smearing the steps with honey and dressing in clothes made of bacon crouched on top for the dream-bear,

Or wearing costumes of other times and lands as you climb, or smoking a joint each step of the way,

Or digging secret passageway from the tower’s base to your basement, Or performing the ceremony of climbing in fog when from the base the top of the tower is lost and when from the top not even the tops of trees can be seen, And all those wilderness tourists who considered the tower their throne, anyone else there a trespasser on their solitude kingdom, And how many times hoping to find no one there, on reaching the last breathless step someone’s already conducting the view from the podium,

And finally, the poet who imagined me writing this poem, who looked down where I stand now looking up ...

And so, looking up at the towerless sky,

I wondered,

Is this all that’s left of the view?

(If there is an audience and I’m reading this it should be from a tower.

In a room if this poem succeeds, walls become lakes, chairs become trees, 200 feet of tower rise me above them, ceiling becomes sky and I’m alone once more

And each of you is alone on some wilderness dream-risen tower.)

But the map still shows the tower is there

And I keep seeing the others who will drive up the dirt road

Only to look up from the base the tower was secured to and rested on Wishing for the view the top commanded to command them

From days no one was there and the view could enjoy being alone, Days of continuous wind sung through the winding stairs when no one rose but the snow, when no one looked down but the hawk on the wind-tossed waves of pine,

To the weekend stampede, every step with a foot on it like the line before a casket waiting to take a last look—

And every photo taken on top looks at us,

And graffiti carved everywhere hands could reach considers us,

And the recording never made of all the words spoken on top listens to us,

And the movie never made of dismantling the tower dismantles us, And the lifetime of the ever-changing shadows of the tower overshadows us all.

I think I’ll climb into the sky and look from the lookout awhile.

My feet should be able to find where each step was and just where to turn to go up the next flight.

My eyes should be ready by now to see what the view has to show.

I want to watch a few centuries go by, houses growing closer one by one, Each in its place replaced by buildings replaced in their place by skyscrapers, And the view from the skyscraper risen from this spot, and the proud who scorn elevator for stairs,

And the crowds no less mysterious yet no less terrifying than those in the city I always return to wondering if I will always return.

And not till the poet stands where the skyscraper stood And looking up points out the view

Will I be ready to climb down the invisible stairs of the air to be put in his mouth and swallowed and called with a whisper— Mescaline.

Staff

I have worn smooth with the grip of my hand branches found by the trail, Caught by my eye and lifted, Thrown in the air and caught by my hand and tested— if it’s not too long, if it’s not too short, if it feels just right,

I say to myself—“This is my staff!” and thump the ground with its end.

Carry me far! Take me where I must go!

Miles away from miles away from every road, every house, every human voice or voice of machine,

Through woods I love,

Past lakes where no one is,

Beyond where the footpath ends, up where the mountains glow and the sky has never been breathed!

And should I again among crutches and canes unbrellas and books under arms

Walk in the skyscraper’s shadow,

It will be with my staff,

It will be in clothes smelling of campfires and moss,

And if myriad strangers stare curious, suspicious, indignant,

I’ll grip my staff tight as I pass

and let wilderness speak through my mouth How the feel of this staff

puts me in touch with the Gods,

Transports me back through the eras, To the epochs of staff-bearing men, To the heritage of this wand of power and prophecy.

Isn’t the only way to write with a pencil this size?

For words to be so large you must get out your compass, And the only way to write mountain is to climb to the top?

Numberless possible staffs wait on the forest floor,

Or fallen from high trees caught in their lower branches,

Or resting against a stump as if someone left them there.

My walking stick urges me on, takes my hand like a friend, Comforts me, steadies me over rough terrain,

Beyond where it’s ever been mapped, Where no human ever set foot, Following the voice of the stream up where the mountains glow and the sky has never been breathed!

Enskyment

Imagine being buried in air,

in the light blue earth of the sky, Slowly lowered into thin atmospheres

on pulleys of evaporation

While shovels of clouds shovel clouds over you

and you hear far away

The last spadefuls of steeples and fireworks

and clapping and laughter

And birdsong and forests and mountains

all scooped on your immense grave of sky!

Imagine those heavenly maggots:

lost kites, lost balloons,

Seeds we make wishes on,

butterflies, fireflies,

Wingspreads of vultures,

and all the nibbling stars.

And branches of trees really roots and roothairs?

And rainbows really the tunnels of moles?

And earthworms peeping from their holes

really birdbeaks probing the earth?

What exquisite decay!

All the warmth the sun gives as it melts you!

All those tons of cirrus, stratus, cumulonimbus!

Skyquakes of lightning!

Your flesh unpetalling in downpours!

Your body become all sunset and ozone, delicate rumbles of vanishing thunder!

Till the aroma of sky after rain

and earth after rain

Is all that’s left of your corpse!

First Drink from a Stream

Into the map feet-first floating downward

I descend toward the first stream I shall drink from To stand one foot on each bank With water rushing beneath me.

Before dipping hands brought together

I would whet my thirst with knowing How many lips searching for lips Had to come this far for a kiss.

And purer than water is pure, And cooler than water is cool, Is the flow of this liquid imagining Down my esophagus.

Beyond the postures of all the ages Of animals bending to sip, I kneel, Lifting in cupped hands

What began and will always begin

From clouds down mountains

Rushing before me and after me

Equal infinities, the living song

Old as water is old

And older than the first boy

Who could suck his own cock

And cupping balls drink from himself The freshness.

And swallowing I would be quenched

Knowing how little of all the water

That ever feels its way

Through the bed of this stream

Is needed to slake my thirst.

And knowing no name for this stream

I will call it after myself,

As sometimes in my quietest time

I whisper my name to myself

Looking up where I came from

Curious what cupped hands dip from the sky For one handful of my voice.

Reworking Work

Rebecca Falls Mescaline Epiphany

We wish that beneficent beings from Outer Space would land on earth and bring us the Vision we need to save us from destroying the world.

We wish a spaceship would come from Outer Space and transport us to its planet’s Utopia where creatures exactly like us but enlightened or creatures very different from us but enlightened exist.

We wonder if some of the people we know aren’t possibly from Outer Space, Or complete strangers of unearthly beauty or great tender geniuses of love, poetry, music, dance, art— are they not emissaries from “out there”?

We wonder if possibly we are

Outer Space Reconnaissance Consciousnesses programmed not to awake till now,

Cosmic Reconnaissance Renaissance Consciousnesses programmed not to awake till now.

What is my Mission on this Planet?

What am I here for? What am I here for?

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

Suddenly we realize WE ARE FROM OUTER SPACE!

WE ARE CREATURES FROM OUTER SPACE!

EARTH IS OUR PLANET IN OUTER SPACE!

We don’t have to go in a spaceship from Earth to the moon and take Mescaline and look back at our Earth or walk in space after smoking millions of joints

to realize we’re in Outer Space!

We are just as much in Outer Space wherever we are on this Planet as we’d be on our moon

or any moon in our solar system or any solar system in this galaxy or any galaxy in this universe

or any universe in the pastpresentfuture!

We are as much creatures from Outer Space as lifeforms anywhere in this galaxy or any galaxy!

There’s nowhere in the Universe

that is more in Outer Space than we are!

We live in the Universe!

It’s not “out there.”

It’s not just something we see in movies to eerie music.

We don’t have to read science fiction

to make love voluptuous cricketsinging nights under all the stars.

Thank you Mescaline and Marijuana for helping us perceive the mystical miraculousness of every day and every second and all living forms of life and every climate and geology, the seasons, the natures of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, sleeping, dreaming, waking, laughing, loving, and the transformation of death!

Each of us should be as much an apparition as Bigfoot or LochNess Monster!

Each of us should be as much an apparition as the Being coming down the ramp of the spaceship from “out there.”

How dear this Earth becomes then!

How sacred every wild place and creature that remains!

How insidious and lamentable the vast factory’s pollution and overpopulation disaster more disastrous than all the dead in every human war!

How clear it becomes to us then

that no one should have to be a slave!

That everyone should he a creative genius of tender love and loving creator of music or poetry, painting or dance, endless continued gentle passionate creations of human mind!

Behold the lilies, they neither spin nor sew!

Think of the whales! They don’t punch timeclocks!

They don’t need Christ or Buddha to be enlightened.

Everyone’s life should be devoted to enlightenment!

Everyone should be free to receive Visions of Mescaline in absolute wilderness solitude!

Ah, I feel the key, for me, to perceiving, entertaining, and embodying Infinite Space and Eternal Time’s Ultimate Implications are to be found in the deepest solitude I can find

in the non-human Manifestation of Cosmos in that realm called Wilderness Reality.

What does Contemporary Poetry Scene in America have to do with this?

Do I live in America? Is it 1984?

Do people who are dead continue to argue whether there is life after death?

This is Heaven!

I don’t have to die

to be Immortal!

I don’t have to die

to be in Eternity!

To feel in this flash of existence

in the Antler form

the unending Amaze!

O Poets are Emissaries from Outer Space descending their spaceship ramps and their visionary message to Earth shall be heard around the world!

Written After Learning

Slaves in Ancient Greece and Rome Had 115 Holidays a Year

Instead of creating better murder weapons to “protect” ourselves,

Better create loving boys and girls

who become loving women and men.

Instead of a higher standard of living

why not a higher standard of loving?

Why not a higher standard of getting high?

No more brainwashed robotzombies!

No more socialization lobotomies!

Thoreau could live a whole year

on money from working 6 weeks.

We canned ourselves in concentrationcamps called cities

And in buildings and rooms where we work. We have become hermetically sealed containers.

The can of today is the wilderness that was.

The can-to-be is the wilderness that is.

As Oscar Wilde said: “Work is the curse

of the drinking man.”

As Stan Jones said: “It’s not what the machine makes, but what the machine makes you.”

As Virgil said: Deus nobis haec otia fecit:

“A god has granted us this idleness.”

As Lessing said: “Let us be lazy in everything except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.”

Should cans stop being made?

Should all factories immediately close down?

What solution do you provide? If everyone’s a poet and no one works, how do we survive?

The way St. Theresa survived on Light?

Love becomes a full-time job?

But where do we get the money to pay people not to work?

Slaves in Ancient Greece and Rome

had 115 holidays a year!

Hey, wait a minute, that makes us more slaves than them!

The Way I Figure It

The way I figure it

No one should be a slave.

Everyone should be free.

When I think of my own life

I think Wow,

Already I’ve worked over five years

in factories!

For working that long I deserve

the rest of my life

to be a paid vacation.

Then I start thinking of my mother

and brother and sister

and friends

Chained to jobs they have to put up with, Yet my father being dead is free from all that, But when I think how he only got

a three week vacation every year, Or how the 12-hour day 6-day workweek for pittance was once taken for granted, When people got a one-week vacation

in their 20s or 30s

Or a two-week vacation

in their 40s or 50s ...

I’ve got to make up for them by golly!

Why, every day a person works in a factory

I figure that gives them a year’s vacation, So boy oh boy, I gotta lotta vacations to live in a single life!

Maybe I’ll give a few out to you

my friends and readers.

Maybe if we all realize we should be

all making up for the wasted lives

(So many now in the history of humans

each of us would have to live a million lives to make up for all their lost vacations)

We can get back in touch with the time

we were less like ants

And more like eagles soaring

over the wilderness realms of the earth.

For the Six Children Brutally Murdered by Their Father, My Cousin’s Child Dead by Disease, and Walt Cieszynski Killed in Carcrash

When Walt died I remember thinking now I have to write the poems he won’t be around to write, Now I have to make up for all the poems never written.

I have to live the ecstasies the children

murdered by their fathers

or dying from disease will never feel, The poems they would’ve lived or written. Then I think of the sick thoughts, the brutal ways of living perpetrated on so many children.

The very fact children must spend so much time in school or adults in offices and factories is an atrocity in itself.

Anyone who has to make a living to live, Who has to work a slavejob all their life, haven’t they been brutally murdered?

Don’t I have to make up for all their life never lived?

Experience all the wilderness they never will?

Smoke all the grass I can for their lack of imbibing

that sacred high, Sex all the joys I can for those who never have or will?

Oh, I have to make up for all the wasted and cutshort lives, all the lost opportunities!

To think of my thirty-one years I’ve only had three autumns with the total of every day free to savor the changes of foliage and weather in wilderness on this planet!

There’s so much to learn, so much to experience, There’s not time in a hundred lifetimes to do it all.

But the only way to start is to be free and in that freedom to he free To make up for all the lives cut short by murder or disease or carcrash Or a livelihood that’s a deathlihood to the soul and the earth.

Factories Are Boxcars Full of Jews

The multiplication of cells of urban hives, Cramming the human spirit into them with truncheons of work ethic.

Children molested by 18,000 murders and a million commercials seen on TV by age 18,

Their fathers job fodder of cannibal consumerism, Their mothers soap opera gameshow junkies.

Cigarets and their advertisements.

Poisonfood and their advertisements.

All the tools of murder and pollution created by Factories—

What difference between this and Hitler elated with unfolding blueprint of gaschambers?

Once more the massacre of millions.

Once more mass graves there isn’t time to bury.

Once more the words “atrocity” and “genocide” find their proper (undeniable) identification.

Every large city could at any moment become an Auschwitz of nuclear incineration.

Were those who worked toward the murder

of 6 million Jews

Worse than those who work toward the murder of all human life?

Christ’s crucifixion only lasted three hours.

Most workers are crucified their whole lives

Their souls impaled by spikes from which their useless bodies and undiscovered continents of epiphany hang.

What future is there for Utopia

When most humans spend most of their lives

Working jobs they hate, working jobs

that directly or indirectly contribute to Planet Death?

What difference between this and the Nazis pumping Zyklon B into gaschambers?

What the Nazis did to the Jews

Factories are doing to the Earth.

Like volcanoes that never stop erupting, Each continually overflowing its own kind of lava Inundating us—here a volcano of cans,

here a volcano of guns, here a volcano of cars, here a volcano of bombs,

Or like huge galleys, triremes, and each slave at his oar, Never able to come topside, Following the beat of the drum, feeling the bite of the lash, Some thinking death is better than life like this,

Some wishing they’d never been born.

Zero-Hour Day Zero-Day Workweek

Are the executives of oil steel aluminum plastic military industrial capitalism

To be looked up to as Great Men and Women to be held as fitting examples of enlightened human beings?

Or are they miserable failures of greed who betray the Earth and the promise of America?

Is who invented napalm to be honored?

Is who invented nervegas to be honored?

Slavery did not end. Almost everyone enslaved to earthdeath accomplice jobs.

A new Emancipation Proclamation is needed.

Liberation from an 8-hour day 5-day workweek to a 5-hour day 1-day workweek getting paid the same amount.

Or how about a 12-hour day 7-day play week?

Or maybe keep only the least harmful factories and everyone has to factory once for a year, the rest of their life free to learn and create, travel to wilds and other lands, like Huxley’s Island?

We think working 8 hours a day a great advance over the time when workers, even children, worked 14 hours a day for lousy wages and conditions.

It is better, but 8 hours a day is still too long!

Our lives should be free, a continual vacation.

Anyone who had to work all their life and had a two-week vacation every year has been robbed.

Anyone who had to work six months a year and had a six-month vacation has been robbed.

Anyone who had to work one day a year and had a 364-day vacation has been robbed.

Only Total Vacation will do.

Expand Wilderness, Reduce Population, Reduce Production!

Anyone who says it can’t be done is performing what I call “The Ghost Dance in Reverse.”

We can shape the Image of Man we desire!

We can shape the Image of Boy we desire!

We can shape the Image of Girls and Women and America and World Peace and Wilderness VisionQuest Enlightenment we desire!

A 12-hour day 6-day workweek

becomes a 1 O-hour day 6-day workweek

becomes an 8-hour day 5-day workweek

becomes a 6-hour day 4-day workweek

becomes a 4-hour day 2-day workweek

becomes a 1-hour day 1-day workweek

becomes a O-hour day 0-day workweek!

People should be paid not to work!

People should be paid to play!

People should lie in hammocks and sip lemonade all day!

Most people are too busy working or resting from work to work on their own mindgrowth poet-ential.

“But,” my mother asks, “what about workers who life their jobs—happy they receive so much money to buy all the amazing things factories make not to mention the benefits they get for medical protection and old age?”

It’s not religion that’s the opium of the people, but ivotfe 121

Work is the opium of the people. O Workers of the World, stop working!

Think of the whales, more intelligent than Einstein or Bach, who never have to work a fucking second of their incredible life!

Workaholics Anonymous

The notion the main purpose of life is to work is a worse malady than alcoholism.

We could have an economy based on play where the purpose of life is geared more to play/ecstasy/meditation than workbeast deathlihood.

America is a Workaholic!

Antler invents Workaholics Anonymous where workaholics go to be talked out of working and where workers laid off or unemployed go to memorize my “Factory” poem and philosophize in pastoral settings about Work’s place in Life.

Were people meant to do backbreaking minddeadening work their whole lives?

It’s time to rework our notions of work.

It’s time to commute the sentence

of everyone sentenced to commute.

It’s time to take back the time taken from us and have the time of our lives.

The purpose of life is not to work meaningless jobs that destroy the Earth.

Re-educate people to see

the main purpose of existence is creative play and ecstasy and work should play a minor part.

Restore semblance of balance between work and play from whose harmony more lives will be realized.

Aren’t human beings actually inferior to plants and animals who have no slaves, factories, wars, but are content simply to be?

Do Sequoias need to take courses in business administration?

Do Blue Whales need a stock exchange or Wall Street?

When Sequoias grow up do they have to get a job and get only a one-week vacation every year?

Do Blue Whales have to fulfill their military obligation?

Do Birds have to read books to learn how to migrate or carry factory-made compasses to guide them?

Must Robins spin treadmills to earn metal discs to purchase their worms?

Do Sequoias have to work all their lives in factories to pay off the mortgage on their homes?

Are Blue Whales fashion-conscious?

Do Sequoias erect statues of dead Sequoias they think were great so future Sequoias can contemplate them?

And when a Sequoia tree dies it stands a thousand years before it falls and when it falls it takes a thousand years before it rots away.

Rather than megalomaniacs of megalopolis, quiescent Sequoias sequestering.

Rather than machinations of mechanization, the actualization of ecstasy.

Rather than a species becomes extinct every second, a factory becomes extinct every second.

Rather than factory, fuckery!

Isness rather than Bizness.

Do Eagles have little green slips of paper they have to sweat in sweatshops to get so they can buy the food they need and pay rent on their eyries and shop for feathers to keep warm?

No matter how cheap you make shoes deer will go barefoot.

Workers angry they’re out of work. Ha!

What about all those working who are out of play\

As if total freedom wasn’t the life work of the creative spirit!

Factoryslaves should complain they’re out of play—

They need freedom more than someone out of work needs a job.

Joblessness? Ha! What about Playlessness?

If there is a work force

why not a play force?

Play ethic vs. work ethic.

Playaholic vs. workaholic.

People think it’s a disgrace not to work, that one is being irresponsible,

But actually it’s those working ecocide jobs who are most irresponsibly irresponsible.

The problem is not that the economy is faltering but that freedom is faltering.

Rather than create more jobs why not create more freedom?

The more we work the less we’re free!

We’re brainwashed to believe

there’s something called an Economy and that when you grow up

You have to get a job and work most of the waking hours of your life to get those little green slips of paper.

The trouble with America is not that it’s out of work but that it’s out of Poetry.

Writing Poetry is a 48-hour-a-day job.

The Poet is never unemployed or laid off, gets no vacations, must always be on call to deliver the God from his mouth.

Parents should want their children to be poets more than priests, lawyers, bankers, executives.

Put America back to Work?

Put America back to Play!

Put America back to Poetry!

Re Wilderness America!

To accuse me of being a sluggard is an insult to slugs!

No grub is a moneygrubber!

“You’re making the workers feel bad about their jobs.” Right!

“You’re making them feel like zombies.”

Right!

In San Francisco 400 apply for hotel bellhop job that pays $4.97 per hour.

Why not 400 apply for job as Poet?

Blacks want 40 trillion dollars reparations for all the unpaid work their ancestors did as slaves.

The Polish Parliament overwhelmingly approves a tough “social parasites” law authorizing forced labor and jail terms for those believed to be avoiding work.

Poles between 18 and 45 out of work three months must register with the state.

Those deemed evading work for “socially unjustified reasons” are forced to work two months “for public purposes” and risk two-year jail terms and confiscation of apartments.

As Carl Sandburg said: “Freedom is everyone’s job, everyone is freedom’s job.”

As Diane di Prima said: “If what you want is jobs for everyone you are still the enemy.”

As St. Pol-Roux had a sign on his door as he slept which said: “Do not disturb,

Poet at work.”

Dream Job Offer

Demonstrate comfort of fancy bedroom set

By sleeping in department store display window facing busy downtown street.

Punch in, put on your pj’s, get into bed and go to sleep.

Shoppers walk by, gawk and talk.

8 hours later alarm tingalings it’s upping time. Return home to write down your dreams.

Make money while you sleep!

Only those who enjoy sleeping need apply.

No bedwetters, wetdreamers, sleeptalkers, sleepwalkers, teethgrinders, buzz-saw snorers, or those who wake up in a cold sweat screaming will be hired.

Must have experience, Degree in Sleepology required.

Why No “Poet Wanted” in Want Ad Column

Those who regard it an affront you write poems and aren’t working—

As if writing poems and being a poet were not valid work in our society,

As if Poetry has no value,

Especially when you write

“Factories Are Boxcars Full of Jews,”

Especially when you invoke a marijuana blowjob religion, Especially when you place Solitude Wilderness Vision Quest above all the Works of Man.

They want you to get a job you don’t like and have to be working full-time so you can’t write anymore.

They want you to confess

your poetry is full of shit.

Somehow your writing threatens them.

Besides, Christ already said it all—

So don’t bother trying to say something new that’s true.

What are the words of a mere mortal next to the Son of God’s?

For the Recognition of the Role of the Poet in Society

James Dickey once said poets inspired by Ginsberg or Bly would be better off to society employed as garbage collectors.

What an insult, I thought, till I learned

Garbage collectors in California make $25,000 a year!

And a poet, after cost of paper, pencils, pens, envelopes, stamps, xeroxing,

On the average makes minus $1000 a year.

But Poetry is great, greater than most poets realize.

Enough poets have scrawled “Dead Poet” on their t-shirts and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

As there is the expression “to put someone to death,” Poetry’s purpose is “to put someone to life.”

What kind of society can you expect where poets make less than garbage collectors?

Wouldn’t that make poetry less than garbage?

Wouldn’t that make parents want their children to grow up to be garbage collectors rather than poets?

Poets are more important than presidents.

Poets are more important than executives.

Poets are more important

than even most poets realize.

“Your Poetry’s No Good Because It Tries to Convey a Message”

Tell it to Jews hanging from meathooks, Tell it to Wilfred Owen’s exploded face, Tell it to James Wright’s cancerous cut-out tongue, Tell it to Victor Jara’s hands chopped off in Santiago Stadium,

Tell it to all the ears, breasts, cocks and balls cut off in every war,

Tell it to all the beautiful eyes gouged out in every war, Tell it to the pyramid of human skulls that never stops growing, Tell it to the decapitated head held up to gape twitching corpse jeering crowd,

Tell it to the fact we’re all in Auschwitz because any second every city can become Holocaust, Tell it to Hetch Hetchy, tell it to Glen Canyon, tell it to Wounded Knee and the Buffalo,

Tell it to the aluminum fibres in your brain and the cancer in your food and water which will eventually kill you,

Tell it to 100 trillion cigarets a year,

Tell it to 100 billion spent on war every minute, Tell it to Johnny Got His Gun, Tell it to the ashes of Neruda’s library, Tell it to 52 million children under 15 working in factories in Southeast Asia,

Tell it to more people born in 2984 than all the people ever born, Tell it to the annihilated White Pine dominions of Wisconsin,

Tell it to the Sequoias still standing who were alive one thousand years before the Bible was written,

Tell it to all the unexperienced homosexual joy since Christianity came into power, Tell it to the $100,000 it cost to kill each soldier in World War II, Tell it to Henry Ford’s factory in France that made tanks for the Third Reich, Tell it to the sunrise, tell it to the rainbow, tell it to the flower made love to by the bee, Tell it to the waterfall that never stops telling, Tell it to the combers that never cease crashing, Tell it to the reflection of stars

in the rain-filled blackbear track, Tell it to the canyons that echo the canyons that echo, Tell it to birdsong, whalesong, wolfsong, cricketsong, Tell it to the clouds as they float overhead,

yell it to the lightning, bell it to the thunder, well it to the pouring rain, spell it

on kindergarten blackboard, knell it to firefly cemetery dusk, Tell it to tombstones who have forgotten their names, Tell it to the shadow of your breathcloud on a winter day, Tell it to mother harp seals

while their babies are skinned alive, Tell it to the naked black youth being hung

by white lynchmob while they point and laugh, Tell it to the geniuses who invent better and better

methods of mass murder, Tell it to the stockpiles of suicide pills

to be dispensed in the event of apocalypse, Tell it to the fact more women raped in America every year than poetry books sold every year, Tell it to the statistics of ecocide, genocide, suicide, Tell it to Kennedy’s brainfragments

quivering on the Dallas street,

Tell it to Sylvia Plath’s head in the oven, Tell it to Lorca while the soldier fires two bullets up his ass.

Truncheons of Work-Ethic Bludgeoning

Why is a soaring eagle

such an inspiring sight? Because we’d like to be like that, Effortlessly soaring above it all, Able to glide on the wind all day without even moving our wings. Yet how many of the five billion humans live lives as magnificent as a soaring eagle?

Who ever thinks of a soaring ant or a soaring sheep?

Every 8 hours more babies born

than U.S. soldiers killed

in every war America fought.

800,000 people per square mile

in some parts of Hong Kong.

More people in the San Francisco Bay Area

than the total population of North America in 1776.

At the current growth rate in 2000 years everything in the visible universe will be converted to people and the ball of people

Will be expanding

with the speed of light.

500 million tons of poison

belch from smokestacks every year.

20,000 wild lakes in Ontario

killed by acid rain by 2000.

3000 square miles of Amazon rainforest cut down each month.

Over half the world’s trees cut down since 1950.

At the present growth rate in the use of the ten most-used minerals we will mine the equivalent of the Earth’s weight in 300 years.

Souls strip-mined and clear-cut by work-ethic!

It’s because we’re so patriotic toward our factories we have to have enough bombs to blow up the Earth a hundred times.

It’s because it’s easier to support our family via factory than poetry we’re never more than 20 minutes from the end of the world.

It’s because the workers don’t want their factories to close down we have enough plutonium to kill everyone 10 times.

It’s because the workers don’t want to lose their jobs they have lost their freedom.

It’s because it’s thought satisfactory for most of us to spend most of the waking hours of our lives in a factory

Christianity can get people to believe

Paradise and Immortality come only after we die—

Rather than now.

But Christ wasn’t kidding when he urged us consider the lilies who neither spin nor sew yet each is clothed in raiment finer than Solomon in all his factories.

Heaven is now. We can live forever NOW!

To an Eagle a single second in a cage is intolerable.

A single adult Grizzly needs a home-range of 64,000 acres. As for the benefits factories confer—

Tell it to Ishi on the L.A. Freeway during rush hour,

Tell it to Black Elk on Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve,

Tell it to the Blue Whales and Redwoods murdered by harpoons and buzz-saws, Tell it to the shadowgraphs in Hiroshima, Tell it to the poets on Skid Row.

Winter Night Can Plant Return

Ten years after completing Factory One snowy cold January night I return to my old alma mater— Walk north along railroad tracks

from Riverside Park to Estabrook Park, Cutting across the snowy parkscape

looking up at the Channel 6 Tower, Over to the wooded slopes of the Milwaukee River and along the snowy trail, Smelling the factory before actually seeing it, the acrid chemical taint, Hearing the factory before actually seeing it, the weird metallic buzz, Finally reaching where more rail tracks

cross the river on an old wooden trestle, Glimpsing through tree-branches at the slope’s crest across the river through tree-branches beyond the far slope, The gigantic can plant, all windows lit, thousandfold machineroar humming.

About to cross over

I see a light flash from behind me and hear a train approach. Backing into the brush, hiding behind an oak

I spy the slow advance. An old locomotive rumbles across, the bridge groans under its weight, the engineer peering ahead through falling snow, The snow-hung trees illuminated, the swirls of snowgusts illuminated, then darkened as the lightbeam passes,

The darkened boxcars passing through falling snow, swaying gently side to side,

Ten boxcars full of coils of aluminum to be turned into millions of cans.

In the distance near the barbed-wire gate at the factory’s rear a man swinging a lantern.

After uncoupling its load inside and switching tracks the engine returns alone.

After it’s gone and its decrescendoing rumble is gone I cautiously cross the bridge

Pausing a moment halfway, gazing upstream— the snow-covered ice, the tree-lined dark park riverbanks, the wild night river scene juxtaposed to Industry’s Monument,

Nearer yet I approach you O Factory from which Factory originated!

Unsuspecting giant, blizzard-engulfed, closer, closer—inside through your windows once more I see the workers and the machines.

Funny, I could be a saboteur with a bomb, or a spy or assassin.

Then I remember I already revealed the top secret in Factory, already blew up all factories with poetry.

This must be a deathbed mirage,

This trembling earth, this noise, these fumes, the huge architecture is a dream.

Perhaps I lived here 5000 years ago and time-warped into the future to glimpse what was in store.

Perhaps my spaceship landed from another planet and I emerged onto this scene.

Perhaps I died in the Wilderness and my spirit returned here for some reason.

Secret rendezvous, secret rendezvous, How could I have known how powerful you’d be to me? The swirling snow, the intense cold, long after midnight, no one else here,

No one on Earth knows I’m here

Standing smoking ceremonial smoke on the deep snow tree-lined bluff, looking over at and into Continental Can, musing and being mused by these thoughts.

Why didn’t the owners answer my letter Requesting to give a performance of Factory to the workers in the plant when I sent them a complimentary copy?

Ten years after completing it I return to find a sprawling two-story addition plus another vast parking lot.

What good did my poem do after all?

The Factory I made disappear ten years ago is twice as big!

Yet the very fact I stand here smoking superb marijuana contemplation confronting the actual monster

is a victory, as much a coup as Sioux brave touching his enemy and able to escape unharmed— Only this “enemy” is working so hard it doesn’t even know I’m here....

Snow covers my boots, icicles hang from my beard before I realize how long I’ve been standing motionless in the blizzard looking in.

And then, retreating, beginning my long hike home, stopping every so often to look back, to see the receding vision

Till the canplant is lost from view, Till only the noise and smell and trembling pervade the plummeting rivercrest trail—

The epiphany, earthshaking as the earthshaking from factoryroar, That it was when the locomotive vanished and its big noise vanished that the reality of the continuing noise and earthquake tremble from canfactory rushed in on me,

Realization the ground-vibrating machineroar radiates outward in every direction

Like an earthquake that never stops.

How far out does that quake tremble?

What effect those tremors

on our flesh, bones, brains?

As in diagrams projecting the impact of a nuclear bomb on a city

We should draw concentric circles from each factory to show the intensity, the reality

Each factory is a ground zero exploding its noise, products, pollution in every direction,

The same as a bomb exploding but continuously for decades and each of us blown up our whole life.

Catching The Sunrise

Raising My Hand

One of the first things we learn in school is if we know the answer to a question We must raise our hand and be called on before we can speak.

How strange it seemed to me then, raising my hand to be called on, How at first I just blurted out, but that was not permitted.

How often I knew the answer

And the teacher (knowing I knew)

Called on others I knew (and she knew) had it wrong!

How I’d stretch my arm as if it would break free and shoot through the roof like a rocket!

How I’d wave and groan and sigh,

Even hold up my aching arm with my other hand Begging to be called on, Please, me, I know the answer!

Almost leaping from my seat hoping to hear my name.

Twenty-nine now, alone in the wilds, Seated on some rocky outcrop under all the stars,

I find myself raising my hand as I did in first grade

Mimicking the excitement

and expectancy felt then.

No one calls on me

but the wind.

What the God Says Through Me

You won’t hear my poems at the poetry reading.

You won’t hear my poems over the radio.

If you want what the God says through me

Come alone with me into Quetico and we’ll canoe across lake after lake where there are no roads or houses

To a perfect lake with a perfect island

Where you and I will pitch our camp and catch fish for twilight supper.

Sitting around the fire at night

Ask me to read something I wrote

For this is the place to hear me,

More stars overhead than you ever saw, no other light in the woods for miles, no other sound but the loon

And the night wilderness smells of September.

This is the place to hear my voice

if you want what the God says through me.

This Is the Poet Pipe

This is the Poet Pipe!

This is the Pipe of Poetry!

I offer it to be smoked

by all the poets I love.

I offer the best grass in the world

for the sacred ceremony.

We will pass the pipe in a circle for centuries on centuries.

The seasons shall come and go

as we smoke ourselves into being. We will smoke the marijuana that grows from the graves of our ancestors.

Their Immortality

shall make us high.

Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It!

If the solar system were five miles long the sun would be a three-foot sphere and the earth a pea a footballfield away!

If the Milky Way were ten miles long the solar system would be the size of a pinhead and the sun a millionth of an inch!

If the sun were the dot over an “i”

the nearest star would be the dot over an “i” 24 miles away!

A million earths could easily fit in our sun yet some stars are so big six billion suns our size could easily fit inside!

The size of my winking eye compared to the sun!

Alan Watts Dying in His Sleep Elegy

“What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? It makes me inevitably think of my birth, of waking up after having never gone to sleep!”

—Beyond Theology by Alan Watts

It was the new grass and Jeff couldn’t wait.

I was just lighting a match when Jim and Carol came in the door

And the telephone rang with my mother telling me

the newspaper said

Alan Watts died in his sleep.

After the first joint I sat in my antique dentist chair

and taking the paddle I used in Quetico

I paddled the air

till I was in my canoe once more in the middle of Solitude Lake.

After the second joint Jim whispered

you can go so far down in Mammoth Cave above the ceiling an underground river flows

so big you can take boat trips on it and above the ceiling above the river lies an even more immense room of the cave, And then Carol whispered a day’s drive from Milwaukee

are caves with sixty-foot underground waterfalls, and the way she told it

we were there.

After the third joint Jeff and I became young animals

wrestling and growling and biting each other

to Beethoven mandolins

Till Jim appeared with a tub of hot water to soak our feet in

while conducting the Vienna Choirboys

accompanied by harp and the fourth joint laughing at the growing pool on the rug Till Carol and I lugged the leaky tub to the porch and raced barefoot around the November block till back on the stoop, pants rolled to knees, we poured warm water over numb feet watching it waterfall down the steps and the rising steam

And before she knew it I’d locked her out and when she knocked the door opened a crack grinning “Who are you and what do you want?” And after letting her in to Kodaly’s songs for girls’ chorus

I crawled toward my writing room gibbering like a thirst-crazed man And crawling back with another joint

of the best grass since I smoked wilderness we smoked it

And then Chopin made me take the mirror shaped like a tombstone and walk toward Jim with it in front of my face so he saw his own face coming toward him and from behind his closed lips my voice—

“How can I speak when I don’t open my mouth?” And then sitting down facing Jeff with his face

I said—“What’s your name? Can we be friends?” And turning the mirror around on my lap

I looked in my own face with surprise, gentleness, infatuation, lust, the slow blossoming of my smile, And watching myself laugh

I wished we all had mirrors on our laps and could have conversations with each other while watching ourselves speak, And then Jeff put on Milhaud’s “Scaramouche” and sitting facing each other balancing our feet

we took turns dancing the beat on each other’s soles

passing back and forth laughs we hadn’t laughed since wilderness smoked us, And after the sixth wilderness I floated

the beaverskull from Quetico in candlelight toward Carol’s face

And accompanied by Jeff and Jim’s shouts of “Popcorn! Popcorn!”

I told Carol I believe each of us is living right now on millions of planets

because if I were God I’d have made it that way, And then I created popcorn

with just enough butter

and we washed it down with cold slugs of beer

And after the seventh day of creation

Jeff brought in ten concert grands playing the William Tell Overture

And I stood on my head till I no longer could

Then danced with the mirror

whirling in circles at top speed

till my reflection and I collapsed

in epilepsies of laughter

and sprawled exhaustion my heart

pounding harder than ever

gazing up at the ceiling still spinning as the lights clicked on and off on and off on and off on and off on and off ...

Alan Watts—you’ll never know you died.

November 17, 1973

The Hereafter of Laughter

Are all my laughs immortal?

my babychortle?

my laughs in the womb?

My childhood and boyhood growing laugh?

My glut of mirth?

My epitome of buffooneries?

My bearded and well-grained laugh?

Do they still exist?

Will I return to them or they to me?

Will I reunion with my past laughs after I die?

The old man praying on his deathbed to be united with his boyhood laugh?

The boy waking up laughing from his dream to silence and darkness?

Will all my most heartfelt laughs greet me into heaven?

The Earth’s Business

The Earth’s business is

Corpses Incorporated And it uses maggots for money.

Deathrattles

Yes or No? If there is life after death, if there is reincarnation,

Will each of us have so many lives That all our deathrattles put together over Eternity

Take up more time than all the lives That ever lived on earth put together?

The Rebirth of My Mouth

Now I return to the forgotten way.

I throw away my fork and spoon.

My knife? I will use my mouth for killing now.

My teeth are sharp enough.

My jaws are strong enough to tear off chunks of living flesh.

I can crush skulls with a single bite, Rip throats, tear guts in a second, Eat the eyes while they still can see And the ears while they can still hear.

I began by eating with my fingers.

Then it was time for my hands to be tied behind my back, To bend over the plate and eat like that. Then it was time to let myself loose four-legged in the woods for a summer, To re-learn how to stalk or lie in wait for my prey, To remember at last the best place to bite to slaughter my food.

Now I am ready to kiss.

Now I am ready to speak of joy and truth with my mouth.

The Darkness Within

One hand on your chest, One hand on your back— the distance between, Between what can be seen— the chest, the back, And the darkness within, What you never see, touch of yourself, lungs, heart, liver, stomach, kidneys, intestines, skeleton.

You will die without holding your heart in your hands.

You will die without holding your 28 feet of intestines.

No way to hold your own skull unless you cut off your head, boil off the flesh.

And the darkness within your balls.

All that semen, yet not white till it sees the light of day.

And all your blood pulsing inside you this instant—is it red or black ?

Black! Did you think there are lights under your skin that illumine your insides so your insides can see themselves?

It’s darker inside your body than in a forest at night.

And you think you know yourself! Why the only way to even begin is to vivisectionize yourself.

So what if it hurts.

You have a responsibility to the inquiry of human identity’s self-discovery even if it kills you.

What else is Poetry for?

Making Love to the Dark

When you have sex in complete darkness You make love to the dark

and the dark makes love to you.

You hug and are hugged by the dark. You kiss and are kissed by the dark. The night plays with your cock with its dark fingers.

The tight asshole of midnight breathes your cock in.

The slippery, rippling vagina of night

invisible, warm and moist enfolds your cock.

You are fucking and being fucked by the night.

You are sucking and being sucked by the night.

You are jacking off and being jacked off by the night.

The thought of white semen spurting in darkness

where it can’t be seen obsesses you.

O to know what it’s like to be blind! To know what it’s like to make love

for one who cannot see!

Playing Dead Love

How many of us have forgotten How we loved pretending to die, How we spent afternoons ecstatic Being killed by make-believe bullets Or in a duel of invisible swords stabbed in the heart.

No one could make the sounds of guns and bombs better than us.

We were virtuosos of ricochet sounds.

Slave, Guard, Spy, Explorer, Pirate, King— We were them all in our secret games.

Each of us knew in his own best way

When the imagined foe dealt the mortal blow just how to topple down snowy hills

Rolling every posture into a tumbled sprawl and there, at the bottom in that breathless Wow

We’d lay, playing dead the way we loved, Motionless, watching the drifting sky, Or eyes closed, feeling the earth spin Letting ourselves be buried By softly falling snow

till we heard our mother in the growing dark calling us home.

Pretending to Be Dead

How many boys who loved playing army, Who loved pretending to be shot tumbling down summer hills,

Who loved pretending to be dead as their bestfriend checked to make sure,

Or who loved pretending to deliver their last-words soliloquy wincing in imagined pain or lost and dreamy,

Find themselves years later trapped on the battlefield

Hearing the voices of enemy soldiers Searching for corpses to mutilate or wounded to torture to death?

What man remembers those idyllic boyhood days then

As he lies still as possible Trying not even to breathe, hoping beyond hope the enemy will pass him by, Knowing if he’s discovered they’ll cut off his cock and balls and stuff them in his screaming mouth

And then, before cutting off his head, disembowel him before his eyes?

Ah, thousands of boys and men have met this end, Millions perhaps by now, so many people so many wars.

Do they go to a special heaven set aside for all who die like this?

Restored to the bodies they had, The memory erased of that insane end to the story of their lives?

Do they still get a chance to play army with joy And pretend to be shot and pretend to die After they meet this end?

Do they still get to thrill

in pretending to be dead after they die?

After this hideous inhuman end

will they laugh and wrestle their bestfriend again?

Bringing Zeus to His Knees

In the drained reflecting pool in the small park facing San Francisco City Hall during the June 12, 1982 Disarmament Anti-Nuclear Rally

A barechested boy lying on his back, arms behind his head, eyes closed, sunbasking.

As speaker after speaker gives inspiring talk

And the crowd roars and applauds, all faces turned toward the stage, The boy lies there—where last week seagulls floated on turquoise ripples.

Does he hear the great pleas for peace?

Or is he dozing?

Perhaps he was listening before behind his closed eyes his dreamlovegirl or boy appeared and glowed and gleamed.

How many loving eyes caress this Vision that does not see them?

How many strolling from the rapt crowd to rest their ears from the anti-war fervor they so much agree with and which inspires so many of their poems, Come upon this Vision and are overcome with the dazzling sight of naked boyhood armpits and chest and belly and face that would bring Zeus to his knees—

I stare uncaring if any see me.

The boy does not open his eyes.

He could be on a hilly grassy meadow or inflatable raft in a blue pool or on his bed taking a summer nap.

I stare so long so lovingly I’m surprised the whole crowd doesn’t turn to watch me staring and join in a staring silent circle around this apparition fallen from heaven.

The beautiful halfnaked sleeping boy Vision says more to me against war, against nuclear power, arms race, nationalism, imperialism, slavery, than all the fiery diatribes put together.

Suddenly I see the boy burn alive, his flesh afire writhing screaming pyre, And the crowd melting flaming agonied forms from World War Ill’s imagined holocaust reality, And then I see him as before and see myself kneeling by his side as before a manger

Lavishing with ecstatic love my boylove dream.

Whitmansexual

Whitman was a boysexual, a girlsexual, a womansexual, a mansexual, A grasssexual, a treesexual, a skysexual, an earthsexual.

Whitman was an oceansexual, a mountainsexual, a cloudsexual, a prairiesexual,

A birdsongsexual, a lilacsmellsexual, a gallopinghorsesexual.

Whitman was a darknesssexual, a sleepersexual, a sunrisesexual, a MilkyWaysexual,

A gentlebreezesexual, an openroadsexual, a wildernesssexual, a democracysexual, A drumtapssexual, a crossingbrooklynferrysexual, a sands-at-seventy-sexual.

Whitman was a farewell-my-fancy-sexual, a luckier-than-was-thought-sexual,

A deathsexual, a corpsewatchsexual, a compostsexual, a poets-to-come-sexual, A miracle-sexual, an immortalitysexual,

a cosmos-sexual, a waiting-for-you-sexual.

Alive! Alive 0!

Your heart is a cock in your chest

that’s continually ejaculating blood. Your lungs are constantly fucking your nose with your breath.

Ejaculation

Every Universe is an ejaculation!

Every sun is an ejaculation!

Every earth is an ejaculation!

Every being is an ejaculation!

Women ejaculate babies!

Girls ejaculate breasts!

Boys are ejaculations that ejaculate!

Men ejaculate six million ejaculations per orgasm!

Everyone alive ejaculates their corpse!

Everything we eat is an ejaculation!

Fruit and vegetables are ejaculations!

Trees are ejaculations—they burst up and collapse in a speeded-up movie of time!

Every leaf is an ejaculation!

The earth ejaculates wildflowers every spring!

The sea is a continual ejaculation!

Look at the youth surfboarding the orgasms!

Every cloud is an ejaculation!

Every lightning is an ejaculation!

Every drop of rain or snow is an ejaculation!

Every sunrise is an ejaculation!

Every waterfall is an ejaculation!

Every meteor is an ejaculation!

Every mountain is an ejaculation!

Every grain of sand is an ejaculation!

Every second that passes is an ejaculation!

This Universe has been ejaculating 100 billion years!

Scientists listen by radio telescope to the Big Bang’s orgasmcry!

Every word spurts from our mouth!

Every book, symphony, statue, painting, film, house, car, plane, ship, train ejaculates from some brain!

Every exclamation point is an ejaculation!

Every inhalation and exhalation

is an ejaculation!

Every shit is an ejaculation!

Every spaceship is an ejaculation!

Every nation is an ejaculation!

Every religion is an ejaculation!

Every Bible is an ejaculation!

Every Savior is an ejaculation!

I calculate ejaculate ululates through All!

Show me anything that’s not an ejaculation!

Playing It by Nose

Why playing it by ear when just as easily playing it by nose?

Why get an earful of this or an eyeful of that or a mouthful of this and not a noseful of that?

Why within earshot

and not within noseshot?

Why hearsay

and not nosesay or smellsay?

If there’s an ear that eavesdrops

why not a nose that eaves-snoops?

As the ear has an echo,

as the eye has a mirror, As the echo is a kind of mirror of the voice, As the mirror is a kind of echo of the sight, What would be an echo or a mirror of the smell?

If the eye with which you see God

is the eye with which God sees you, The nose with which you smell God

is the nose with which God smells you.

Aha!

A hundred feet under earth birds once flew a hundred feet above earth.

A hundred feet above earth whales once looked up a hundred feet to the surface of the sunny sea.

Trees Seen Now

Trees seen now whose roots touch

tops of trees dead centuries underground, Someday their tops will be where roots of future trees will touch.

Childfoot Visitation

One night traveling a Green Tortoise bus San Francisco to Seattle,

The rear of the bus converted to pads for sleeping,

Sleeping on my back as we plunged through pouring rain, the other weary passengers sleeping,

Suddenly something moving in my beard and under my nose woke me up—

Opening my eyes in the darkness

I saw in the flickering headlight patterns of passing cars

The small foot of the little girl sleeping beside her mother.

Cleansmelling childfoot flower stretching beneath my nose as she changed position in her dream.

Gently pushing it away, careful not to wake her, I drifted off to sleep

Thinking how many men who never had a child are visited by a childhood foot slowly sliding through their beards opening their eyes to its perfect shape in the twilight?

Suddenly out of Eternity coming to me white and pink and smelling good, For the first time in my life a little girl’s naked foot woke me up.

Chipmunk Crucifixion

No chipmunk had to be crucified on a tiny cross of twigs

To save all the other chippies, Had to have nails pounded through his little paws, Had to take upon himself

all the sins of all the chippies that ever were or would be and die in agony

So that after they died all the chippies could live again forever,

But only if they believed

in all the sayings and doings of the chipmunk crucified on the tiny cross of twigs.

Lip-Licking Deer Shitting Meditation

When you become such good friends with black-tailed deer that live in the black oak forest

Sierra Foothills

That 20 feet away they graze contemplating you as you sit on a stump in silence admiring them

And they think nothing of shitting in front of you

looking over their shoulders

across their backs and rear-ends their black tails lifted

As the perfectly-shaped same-size brown pellets fountain out in a delicate continuous fountain,

And when they gaze at you

with their big black eyes while they shit

And suddenly their long pink tongues curl out

and they’re licking their lips, Licking their lips while shitting

and looking over at you with their deep shy eyes, Isn’t it proper etiquette to lick your lips back, to think nothing of pissing in front of them, showing off your cock

and the long arc of urine saved up for them knowing they like its salty savor

like salad dressing

on their grass and mushrooms, Isn’t it proper etiquette you should look at them curious playful friendly

and lick your lips in return?

Bedrock Mortar Full Moon Illumination

Seeing the reflection of the full moon in the rainfilled bedrock mortar holes where earliest California Indians ground acorns with circular grinding stones And sensing how the full moon

is like a mortar stone in the sky, And then seeing the image of my face

looking up at me from the moonlit surface and sensing my own evanescence, how my face is like an acorn

time grinds to fine dust, And thinking thousands of years Indians ground acorns here Singing their acorn songs gossiping and laughing

or silent and musing listening to the pleasing sound

of mortar stones grinding acorns Or after a big storm

gazing in the rainfilled holes at their reflections

or seeing the full moon mirrored Or deer hot from play

dipping shy twilight muzzles

in the cool pools

As blue oak and black oak

ponderosa pine and digger pine incense cedar and manzanita grew and died in continuous ever-changing spots

around the site.

Yet just as surely years from now faces staring here

After scooping out fallen leaves and feeling with future fingers the wet smooth tapering holes in the mossy lichen-covered rock contemplating themselves looking up at themselves contemplating these same thoughts will vanish,

While century after century the full moon continues to stare down and see its face unseen by anyone in the forest

Reflected in the rainfilled mortar holes from long ago.

The Discovery of Lake Michigan

Canoeing down a graceful willow-lined river to its mouth,

Or hiking through forest parting high brush on some steep bluff,

Or struggling over sand dunes smelling water,

Suddenly the original happener-on-er gazing at the endless blue!

One night at twilight the first human being

to stand on the shore of Lake Michigan Stood on the shore of Lake Michigan

and took a drink from a wave.

She’d never seen a body of water so big. Perhaps this was the end of the Earth, Perhaps this Ocean stretched on forever.

How many centuries passed

Before someone courageous enough

tried canoeing across it and returned? Whoever it was must have been regarded as

the Columbus of Lake Michigan, But those people didn’t call it Lake Michigan And before humans came

Lake Michigan had no name.

Catching the Sunrise

When I see the first light

touch treetops on the far shore I launch my canoe without a sound

and float into perfect calm.

Not till the lakefloor disappears

do I dip my paddle And begin without a sound for the other side.

Not a drip or a ripple

I go so slow.

When I reach the center of the lake the sun is up enough the far shore glows.

Soon I’m paddling in sunlight, mist rises in wraiths.

On seeing the bottom

as I near the other side I stop paddling and glide, not a breath of wind.

Bird sings. Fish jumps.

Looking back where I came from

I can see the trees at my camp begin to be touched by the sun.

To All Wilderness Views

Offering the View the joint, Offering the joint the View— so the View can be high too, But the View is already high, the View of Views.

Feasting my eyes on the View a zen of horizons dawns.

Do I agree with the View?

Does the View agree with me?

What are my views compared to its views?

Reviewing my life in view of the View, I see what my prospect is from the prospect. A prospector of prospects, my outlook is my vantage point, my perspective is my overview.

Having a Viewpoint helps in having a point of view—

Taking in the View, The View takes you in too.

You’re in the View and the View’s in you.

After All Is Said and Done

I want to lie down in dappled leaf-shade, In quivering shadows of quivering leaves— be they oak, be they maple, be they elm or birch,

I want to rest in the play of shadows over my reclining form, The massage of shadows which consoles me in its way, Restores for me with whatever restoration Flickering shadows of leaves afford— be they willow or aspen, be they poplar or beech,

I want to be caressed by shadows of wavering leaves, Soothed off to sleep feeling the gentle breeze, Looking up at the rustling sun-drenched crown—

Be it basswood, be it chestnut, Be it walnut or hickory, after all is said, after all is done, This is the way

I would die.

Notes and Index

Note on the Text

The first three parts of this five-part book were what I originally envisioned as my book titled Last Words. The poems in those three parts were written between 1967 and 1974. For a while I considered titling that book First Drin/( From a Stream—a title which fits it as well as Last Words.

“Factory,” the middle part of that projected three-part book, was published as a book to itself by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press in 1980. It’s #38 in City Lights’ “Pocket Poet Series.” In this present volume, “Factory” appears for the first time in the context of the other poems—from “Trying To Remember What I Learned” to “First Drink From a Stream.”

Part four of this present five-part book consists of work/play meditations that elaborate and further elucidate the implications of my “Factory” poem. “Factory” was begun in 1970 and completed in 1974; it’s a single, continuous poem in thirteen sections, not a collection of thirteen separate poems. “Rebecca Falls Epiphany,” written in 1974, is to “Factory” what “Footnote to Howl” is to “Howl.” The remaining poems in “ReWorking Work” were written between 1978 and 1983. Some of them were inspired by objections to Factory I had heard or read. “Winter Night Can Plant Return” is a true narrative.

The poems in part five, “Catching the Sunrise,” were written between 1973 and 1983.

Therefore, this present volume Last Words spans 1967 to 1983.

Notes On The Poems

Rexroth as He Appeared to Exist...

—Written in 1968 after attending a party for Rexroth following his first poetry reading in Milwaukee. A sort of elegy-in-advance.

Last Words

Wanbli Galeshka wana ni he o who e—Oglala Sioux for “The spotted hawk is coming to carry me away.” One of the Ghost Dance songs.

“a perfect stranger by the name of Whitman”—Charles Whitman, University of Texas student who, from the 300-foot campus tower, shot and killed 14 and wounded 30 in 1966.

Factory

Australopithecus—Early human beings who lived three million years ago in Africa.

“Even the most ethereal vision of the mystic is knowledge much as an amoeba might be said to know a man.”—line from Kenneth Rexroth’s long poem “The Dragon and the Unicorn.”

“Engulfed Cathedral”—piano prelude by Debussy.

Martin Eden—great novel by Jack London I read when I was 16 and which inspired me to become writer.

De mortals nil nisi bonum—Latin saying: “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”

“How in 1810 the first can was made”—In 1795 Napoleon offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could come up with an effective manner of preserving food. Thousands of his soldiers were dying in battle, but even more of them were dying from starvation and food poisoning. Fourteen years later the prize was won by Nicolas Appert of Paris, a confectionary chef, pickle maker and vintner. He invented “canning” in glass jars. In 1810 Peter Durand of London applied Appert’s discovery to preserving food in tin canisters.

Baluchitherium—the Earth’s largest land mammal, an 18-foot-tall hornless rhinoceros that lived in Asia 20 million years ago.

Chidiock Tychborn—a 1500s youth sentenced to beheading. The only poem we have by his name is the haunting lyric he wrote the night before he died: “Lines Writ By One in the Tower, Being Young and Condemned To Die.” The refrain line is “And now I live, and now my life is done.” Learned this poem (also the poems of Wilfred Owen) from James Wright in the Summer of 1968.

Teratornis—an extinct carrion-eating cousin of the condor, with a wing-spread of 12 feet, the largest flying bird in the history of life.

Ghost Dance—ritual dances and songs practiced by Plains Indians in the 1880s, by whose repetition they believed they could magically (without fighting) make the white man vanish, the buffalo return, and all Indians live in peace in their ancestral lands.

Puberty of Smell

—When a friend of mine returned from Vietnam, he went back to the factory he worked in before being drafted. After his first day back on the job, he locked himself in his bedroom. His mother knocked and asked if he wanted some dinner. There was no answer. She thought he was taking a nap. Minutes later she heard the shot.

Rebecca Falls Mescaline Epiphany

—Rebecca Falls is a tumultuous waterfall in Quetico Provincial Park, a 1750-square-mile lake-forest canoe wilderness in Ontario where I’ve spent more time alone than in my mother’s womb and where this poem was written in October 1974.

Written After Learning Slaves...

—Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, in his book La Droil à la Paresse (The Right To Be Lazy), relates that slaves in ancient Greece and Rome had 115 holidays a year.

For the Six Children Brutally Murdered by Their Father, My Cousin’s Child Dead by Disease, and Walt Cieszynski Killed in Carcrash

—Wladyslaw (Walt) Cieszynski was born in Poland, lived most his life in Wisconsin. His first book of poems, The Temple of Your Volcanic Kiss is Burning, was about to be published by a press in San Francisco when he died at age 30 in a car crash in Milwaukee in 1976.

Zero-Hour Day Zero-Day Workweek

—Marshall Sahlins, in his book Stone Age Economics, presents convincing evidence that Paleolithic people had to work only 15 hours a week to satisfy their needs. In England in 1830 people worked 14 hours a day. A bill was introduced that would’ve prohibited children under 10 from working in factories and shortened the work day for those under 18 from 14 to 11’/a hours. The bill was defeated on the grounds that it would “saddle the British operative with an idle, unprofitable family.”

“Your Poetry’s No Good Because It Tries to Convey a Message”

—Charles Higham, in his book Trading With The Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–49, reveals that Standard Oil knowingly supplied fuel for German U-boats, ITT supplied communications equipment for buzz bombs that hit London, Ford maintained a factory in France that made tanks and troop carriers for the Third Reich, Chase Manhattan Bank bought and sold gold from teeth and wedding rings from death camps.

Alan Watts Dying in His Sleep Elegy

—Two other quotes by Alan Watts to consider: “Death means going to sleep and never waking up as if we had never been born.”

“To feel life is meaningless unless T can be permanent is like falling desperately in love with an inch.”

Playing It by Nose

—Scientists recently discovered that salmon find their way from the Pacific Ocean back to the parent stream where they were born by the sense of smell.

Childfoot Visitation

—occurred en route to Seattle to read at a benefit for Amnesty International in 1982. Green Tortoise is a counter-cultural alternative to Greyhound: old hippie buses piloted by authentic colorful robust veterans of the ’60s.

Chipmunk Crucifixion, Lip-Licking Deer Shitting Meditation, and Bedrock Mortar Full Moon Illumination

—were written in Fall of 1982 when I lived alone in a cabin built by Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, near Gary Snyder’s homestead in the Sierra Foothills.

To All Wilderness Views

—As Ginsberg in Mind Breaths teaches a meditation on minding the breath, here I present “Mind Views,” a meditation on “minding the view.”

About “Factory”

What do we do with a person who slowly tortures children to death? That is what Factories are doing, not only to the bodies and minds of children, but all human beings and all living things on Earth. Faster and faster the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat is poisoned by Factories. One ton of toxic substances per person in the United States is dumped into the air, water and earth every year! The flesh of Americans contains so much DDT it wouldn’t pass federal standards for human consumption! Every day more cows, sheep and pigs are killed in America than all the Jews in concentration camps in World War II. Every year we use up enough trees to build a ten-foot-wide boardwalk 30 times around the world at the equator! Each year in the U.S. alone one million acres of oxygen-producing trees are paved over! When Whitman heard the workers singing their varied carols he had no idea it would be this way today. In Whitman’s time Mannahatta was smaller than Milwaukee is now. When he died in 1892, the tallest building in Mannahatta was ten stories high.

Once people sang as they worked—songs of voyageurs, sailors, cowboys, harvesters with scythes. What songs do factoryworkers sing? The workers of today don’t realize they’re wielding the murder weapons of the World. They don’t think eight hours a day they commit a crime against Humanity. They don’t think eight hours a day no one can be proud working any job that contributes to Planet Death. Poets who find themselves in Factories to survive must never forget they are spies behind “enemy” lines, doing espionage for Humanity’s Most Hopeful Future. What top secret will they escape with? Not for one second should they lose sight of the fact Factories are unceasing increasing erupting Volcanoes—supertankers moored everywhere on Earth continually spilling out death. What price do we pay for the miracle of Factory?

In a 1971 interview, Albert Speer, Hitler’s second in command, was asked in his prison cell in Spandau: if Hitler had admitted to him that he was exterminating the Jews, what would he have said to him. Speer replied he would have told Hitler: “You’re killing the Jews? That is insane! I need them to work in our factories!” In the same interview, Speer said: “It is this vast gulf between our technological potential and our moral development that makes this age both so challenging and so terrifying. We now have the power to reach the stars—and to destroy our own planet.... In a world terrorized by technology, we are all in Auschwitz.”

I sold myself to Factory in order to make money to buy freedom to study and write Poetry! I enlisted at CCC. Not Civilian Conservation Corps, but Continental Can Company, Plant 77, one of over 200 worldwide. Surrounded by barbed wire fence, along the Milwaukee River in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: the largest can factory in the world under one roof. I worked in the press dept., packaging the tops and bottoms of cans into narrow bags or cardboard tubes as they came from a machine called a press which punched them from sheets of aluminum. The press machines were like huge machine guns except rather than shooting bullets they shot lids—1000 a minute advancing toward me in a column down a long narrow chute. Once packaged, the lids were shipped by fork-lift trucks called hysters to the other side of the dept., where they were run through machines called minsters. The sole purpose of the minsters, each of which cost half a million dollars, was to stamp fliptops onto the lids. The minsters were even louder than the presses. Each new worker had his ears measured and was given a set of earplugs in a carrying case and was expected to wear them at all times on the job. They helped, but only somewhat. When you lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, the sound of the machines would still be ringing in your ears as loud as if two shells were put next to them and you were hearing the sea. Two months after I quit, the machines still ringing in my ears, I sat down with notes I’d written on the job and began arranging and expanding them into the 13 sections of “Factory.”

I hear an empty can blown clattering down the alley in the wind. I remember those sweltering months in the bowels of the Factory. Thousands of poets (perhaps millions) are working in Factories as I write this. May poems more powerful and tender than I’ll ever write leap from their brains! May they inspire others and may those others inspire others! May we live to see a time when it seems the world is not doomed, a time when each human enlightenment is worth more than all the money in the world!

Index of Titles

The Antler’d Dancer

The antler’d dancer is a prehistoric painting on a ceiling which dominates the innermost recesses of Les Trois Frères cave in Ariège, France. The cave, in the Pyrenees, was discovered a few days before World War I by three boys who were brothers. Inside a grotto they found a long tubelike passage—a flume, hardly two feet in diameter—through which one had to crawl and wriggle on one’s belly for 50 yards to come to a large chamber with animal forms engraved everywhere on the walls. Above them, facing the mouth of the difficult passage, on the ceiling 15 feet from floor level in a craggy rocky apse, watching, peering at the visitor with penetrating eyes, is the antler’d dancer (291/2 inches high and 15 inches across, engraved and bearing black paint), who has the appearance of a man with the horns of a stag, eyes of an owl, ears of a deer, paws of a bear, tail of a horse, and who is plainly dancing or prancing.

adapted from The Mastas of God: Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell

Figures of men wearing antlers on their heads reveal something of the way the Paleolithic mind worked. The so-called Sanctuary of Les Trois Frères is a bell-shaped alcove with overhanging rocks and fissures. At the top of the “bell,” we find engraved and painted the famous figure of the “Sorcerer” which the Abbé Breuil called “the Horned God.” This composite being presides over the “Sanctuary” of the cave, whose walls are crowded with the most remarkable animal figures: bison, mammoth, rhinoceros, lion, bear, ibex, horse. The “Sorcerer” has the appearance of a man bending forward, his eyes big and round like those of a night bird or a lion or a “ghost,” deer antlers on his head, and the ears and shoulders of a stag. The lower part of the back is provided with a horse’s tail, below which the sexual parts are seen, rather human in shape, but located where a feline’s would be. The Abbé Breuil interprets the figure as “the god of Les Trois Frères, the arch sorcerer embodying the attributes and exercising the functions of all the creatures he depicts, the spirit governing hunting expeditions and the propagation of game.” It is not surprising to find so hypersymbolic a figure at the highest and innermost point of a chamber that is decorated with hundreds of figures, in the arrangement of which Magdalenian symbolism is displayed with a richness unattained elsewhere.”

from Treasures of Prehistoric Art by André Leroi-Gourhan

One of the oldest drawings of a shaman that we have is the famous “Dancing Sorcerer” in the late Old Stone Age cave of Trois Frères in southern France—a man dressed up in the skins of various animals that were hunted for food, and over which his ritual dance had power. It is interesting that the Sorcerer wears a headdress of deer antlers, because deer antlers in some species seem to act as a stimulus that attracts other deer closer for combat and thus to be killed by hunters. This biological fact would seem to account for the persistent prevalence of deer antlers in hunting magic—all the way from Mesolithic Star Carr in southern England and the deer-horned Gallic divinity Cernunnus who lingered in southern France until Roman times, to the deer-antlered shamans of central Siberia still known to anthropologists in the 18^th century, to the sacred antlered kings of ancient Iran and archaic China (where animal horns are still valued in magic and medicine), and indeed even to Central America where deer-magic is still closely related symbolically to the ritual hallucinogenic cactus, peyote.

from “Shamanic Origins of Religion and Medicine” by Weston La Barre, Ph.D. in Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 11, 1979