Deathwatch (from 1977)

C. R. W. Nevinson. A Taube. (1916-17)

Silence, amigo, men are dying.

Once a fiery cannonball, blazing missile,

now the perfect arrangement of strewn youth.

Who's today's hero?

Lenin is dead

and so are the children of this dark place.

This impermance suffices to say,

well, maybe in the next loophole,

that we all gotta go.

Saturated in the emotional counterplay, wait!

Who's dying? Not I.

Who's arguing the cause of existence?

Or its annihilation? Or its subterfuge?

The rights of these generals and undergraduate

innocents, the rights of the children and

what was once playtime...

Once a lovely view through Chicago,

now ghetto mania, ripped apart by city planners

and big rats.

Look, when you live this far out into space,

the whole scenario unfolds slowly

quietly violently until the entire population is

blinded by syphilis or controlled by

machine gun or worse:

When is the final Judgment?

Overwhelmed by hostility and a protective instinct,

the war could be won by pregnant flies.

Does God mind? Is he sinking into an old skin

or rummaging through letters we've sent him?

Does he save our prayers like birthday cars?

Mi amigo, I look at the stars

blasted in my imagination and they break apart

as real as I am sitting here,

letting the tape type and erase all this

deathwatching.

Tired, tired, tired of your slender view,

I swim to the backroom, open the window,

call your name, "Omega!"

and then reform.

Audience is not necessary for my anger,

eating leaves is natural.

Friend, friend, at best

we can move to the suburbs

or buy a condominium in Miami and

learn to speak Spanish.

I march from living room to

kitchen in search of Russian refugees, I want to

feed them and breed with them and

perhaps hear their stories.

Is anger hereditary?

If so, we'd have a wild race of

democrats.

You and me, amigo,

standing over these deceased,

we've got a long way to go.

The feeling is living in the skin, dormant

and yet,

at best we can heat ourselves on the death

fires escaping from the bloody nostrils,

and I won't cry through

the gates anymore or open my view any

wider than theirs and we may be safe

a few more years if the rats

don't find us first or God

decides to make a kind of emergency landing.

As long as he sleeps and the flag

keeps on flying, we'll be fine.

(May 30, 1977)