American Roads
These highways spread across the Land like giant roads made by men for inhuman crossing; this language of a native origin, spells its laughter in the cross of cultures belonging to no one, and there in the hidden nuances the word bleeds like a crucifix found inside the measured pages of lips untamed, of a fountain of tongues too smooth to realize its common nomenclature, we are something to see, spelled differently, still part of the Land; a crisis, the strong have mixed with the weak, regionalism is everywhere, but at what price, this grand facade, a sale of the Eucharist, a blind profiteering madness proliferates in our great Nation, America the beautiful has entertained lusts for Power, has deployed missiles over- seas, has fashioned the Atomic clock into a self destructing time- bomb... The hilt of the language is some unspoken dream we all posses the common birth from which there is no escape. The post-war economy is built for the defamed virtues of a Corporate State, stagnation, control, and Democracy has become the Winter of our Discontent... So traveling from the far point of a nexus of languid seas, into the boiling pot, forever the sacred coming of a new Messiah of hearts and freeways, forever the cloudy blue of terminal hiding places, the skin of smoke on the misty mountains of yesterday, the hidden servile tongue of Magog upon the spoken slave, asunder the gears of sleep in the machinery, a crane moves against the sky, steel upon the earth, forked stone, sparks and trembles, something gnashing, gnawing its way above the ground, eating into the guts of the Land, spewing smoke in gaseous emissions, the thing blind and heavy, a hurt post-industrial primed giant, a cool Colossus, a pitched blackened pit from where it came, its spawning from the core of the Planet, where it crawled from melting iron, to its sky-line of black and angry smoke... The Beast with seven horns slanks across the long rivers of its slouching birth, from a borrowed moment the greasy handshakes of men, the placid treasure of the free wheeling Industry spilling oil onto fractured shores, the poison smells of dying skin, reeks of the red blooded roses of a rancid stream; the underbelly, one vast and purple gangrene stinking in its search for the once wondrous Free Enterprise, a virtuous toll of Freedom itself the feral beauty of a garden that was once nurtured and well cared for, a prison sentence to the Western Frontier of that magical sojourn through Night's black pit... We were born free, but something happened, an incredible mathematical formula, pure and unadulterated greed, the imbecile in the furnace room turned the heat up to its breaking point, a sky of birds now misfiring the missiles of demonic machines, the liquid grime of hatred filled oceans of misery, born on the Fourth of July we find that the celebrated wind of Culture has blown to bits he tiny fragility of children's ponderous vacation from school, the shy tenements of petroleum forced breathing the air, the rendezvous with Death in its plush red carpeted palace, the breaking point, twenty thousand Republicans storming the stage with broken paper hats, while God talks on the big screen, hidden in the silence of a scavenging voice... There is no metal worth saving, but the grace of our american roads gives us something to walk upon, the last of the Land is holding out, the War ensues with its broken testimony of chopped liver and bullets to bleed by, what we have conquered it the certain falsity of the undead walking with inhuman chagrins on their mystical faces, smiling in their wicked eyes, the clean fountain of the private Free Speech of the wounded aftermath of an angry Vietnam says no more than the New Deal of social lepers... We are moving, constantly searching the hidden wheels for their power usurping the wind... We are victims of the moving movie-picture that God plays Hide-n-seek in, where the walls are covered with blood, and thirsty animals excavate their passion on a crawling arena, where that which is good is the plain sack holding a grenade with its ticking pear burning from the plastic toy that it is supposed to be... we have never killed, but we have fought on the surface of the Great Machine that kills with nerves of steel, that forces men and women into submission, and bleeds from its false Eye, talks of Religion in the name-sake of commerce broken teeth, ancient redwoods cut down like disappearing totem-poles, busted the back of the windy City Crawls upon all fours, celebrates its birth in the phantom blues, howls like the wind, with its lethal mechanism set to kill... The brain dances impeccably against the sad demise of the Spirit, what great banality, what cold and reclusive soldiering, what onset of maddening tides come from the hungry earth??? The Body of Love is not a potion, not a gathering of nervous tensions, but a displayer of human understanding, a great and compassionate language from the land of its roots. We follow blind in the night, inside the funeral mores of our trapped Reason. We come, the commercial attributes of a set society, head- lights aimed like cannons at the clean smoke that living washes its hands in obtuse and dirty air. The bleeding crucifix is attached to a green tree, bloody arms waving with the turning of stars gone, creating the nude and bold asylum of someone who is that old. What is the angry vision of some jailed whisper that is the rumour of traffic in some faraway Africa nestled by the dingy sea. Holy Mother we are pioneers of the walking freeway, an endless and haggard mass of people come from a Brave New World, with hunger deep in their pelvis, and a ghost of mediocrity punishing them with its stark and naked wheels of grief. Blood pours from the hands, feet, mouth and nose, the great Bureaucracy is spent in flames, Christ! the blood that is wasted one these iron tracks of the poor and the blind, they have cut down the trees so they can carve walking sticks for the soldiers who fought against Sherman, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Mao's dynasty... Hemmingway is dead, his stolid corpse is rusty and cold, his eyes bled into an ink scar upon his wrist, his grave is the warm blue of the sea, the seer itself comes from and anguished culture, to arrive in the teeming waves of a sea-fairer, who must play fair, a paved road to Rome's turbulent cleansing, the child on the way to the City of St. Francis leaning on a highway sign, with thumb riding the wind. City auspices, crimes against nature, we travel the hard-line between Fantasy and Reality, the cold outlook of primary functions, the Poem unheard among alien lands, this service from which all things flow, like a tribe of nomads wandering the endless roads, all encompassing, the silent kings of City-states belong to no one, the rare infidels seek the long status of riders and industrious saints of the backwards fury that has melted the sea and the mountains now fused as one, we return shouting for our freedom, the strong shamanic rites reveal only the shadow of a primitive culture, returning then to the Beginning, a causeless epoch like Floods shattering awakening, like something of our H. G Wells War of the Worlds, the populous in transit, moving through the broken cities punished by a huge and amorphous technology, the austerity of stars blinking their eyes in the Void, shouting to be seen in their super-novas giant climax, and all we are is maintained by the ground, feet bloody from walking, the Wise-blood of social coherence produces a movie for the times, Grapes of Wrath in black and white, John Huston sitting on the jungle with Cortez's Wife, John Birch hiding behind the camera, angry and withered from his money-plain speculation, the cars running on massive freeways, her BMW pulling to the front-lines, machines of the Golden Age, we are powerless, roads that lead everywhere and nowhere, Los Angeles, the Lost Angels spend time in thirsty colleges learning of the American Debut, shy children walk from here to the depot to spend quarters on ice-cream, bottles emptied and collected for spare-change, the industrial homeless pray in churches to the God of Cosmopolitan safety, Freud wanders bearded in beat bars looking for an easy catch, eating pretzels in the camera room, holy altars built to the gods of Commerce, strange beach blues of the hidden I love the Alaskan coast though oily beaches bleed into river-otter and bird-prey, vultures hover above the pretty arena from which march the warriors of the new Christ-cavalry, yes, they are the bitter bride and groom of the salvation of the Moon-walk encounter of a thousand holes in Winchester Cathedral, we mix the silent cues of and endless pool-game brushing green velvet for a green-fist of dollars, take back the sound of hush on the carpeted floors of Jerri Lewis's giant telethon, corporate stars fight for the presidency, weird Trump pulls out a flush-straight against the hinjinx of passionate parties where El Salvador Bleeds its holy triumph against the enemy and the white Quetzalcoatl of the inhuman dream to test the strings of the sky-lab, return then to what positioning of the space-race struggling to rocket the first tree grown in zero gravity, yet the Planet is starving and the forest is dying, rain is plentiful, Mr. Bush in his giant golf-cap goes to cocktail parties, rain-man express, rainbow tribe going nowhere, toasting the Earth in its march to time tables of the early morning Eden-express train against the asylum, against the Catch 22, against Slaughter House Five, against the return of the Martians, chronicles of Heaven and the sad decay of City-parks, Central Zone and the push for a concert in the stage of the homeless tribes and forgotten ghosts of the communal dead deranged and heavy heads to the Rock of Woodstock and the years in counting, forgotten eras melt with the Best slandering Bethlehem's birth right, and Yeats with a Vision for Pound's closet, the Irish shall rule the unruly, while the bombs go of in South Africa, Crane burns his draft-card again and again in the superstitious movie-picture about success and the fear of it, Whitman with his smoking leaf, cheerfully chewing grass in the underground bus-station of New York City, time is on our side, we return, back through the mental tunnel for our clear escape around the impossible dream of suicide in the streets of frenzy, collecting dust on the carpet of a godly estate for the Texan millionaires to market electric cars, oily dinosaurs spend their time on the Gulf of Mexico, satellites send images down from space, Billy Graham moves in, he talks a lot about the End of the World, but these american roads, a journey to the center of the mind, have mercy flag without a map show us that the Land of the Brave still move in unfurled hiding places, take the children down into the cellar, make sure their eyes are hidden from the light, lead rooms, and castles of plutonium, these are the roads to the heart where the City of Power is pushed like a flower uprooted, shouting out blind petals of heroin and rock candy, City where the sky is falling, City of ash and tumult, we have run these roads before, to the edge of some america of dreams.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray