But it was here I also learned about California. In California you could eat the oranges off the trees, along the seaside boulevards the avocados fell when they were ripe and you found them everywhere and peeled them and you ate them on the seaside boulevards. When you were sleepy you slept on the sand and when you were hot you went wading in the warm Pacific surf and the waves lit up at night off the shore with their own light. And off beyond the waves was a gambling ship.
I decided to go to California.
Armed only with his unpronounceable last name, he went down to the freight yards to begin his journey. He confuses this now in his mind with the West Side slaughtering plant such atomized extract of organic essence, such a perfumery of disembowelment, that in the fetid blood spumed viscera mist above the yards helplessly flew flights of gulls schools of pigeons moths bats insect plagues all swirling round and round in a great squawking endlessly ejaculative anguish.
I found a door that slid open, got it wide enough to slip through, climbed in, pulled the door almost shut behind me stood in the darkness breathing triumph. The car lurches again, almost stops, begins to roll, I was thrown into something that moved. I look around my private car my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness, soot and pungent cinder begins to flow through the boards, that railroad tang, my eyes see all around the perimeter of my private car a cargo of youths. We are the shipped manufacture of this nation there must have been thirty or forty of us in that car gradually my eyes made out fifty sixty sitting on the floor by the dawn in eastern Pennsylvania at a siding in the chill frosted morning a hundred of us jumped and ran when the bulls came shouting ahead from the engine. Later alone in the tall weeds of another crossing a toot and leisurely around the bend bell-clanging another stately red ball my chance I make for it all around me from the weeds a thousand like me leap I thought I was alone.
I let it go. All my gaunt brothers in my own rags carrying my roped valise hopped the freight. I watched it go. I put up my collar pulled my cap down on my head stuck my hands in my pockets and headed north up the road.
2
Come with me
Compute with me
Computerized she prints out me
Commingling with me she becomes me
Coming she is coming is she
Coming she is a comrade of mine
Comrades come all over comrades
Communists come upon communists
Hi. Hi.
We are here to complete our fusion
We are here to create confusion
Do you confuse coming with confession?
Do you fuel for nuclear compression?
I’m for funicular ascension.
Decline all word temptation
Define all worldly tension
Deride all prayerful intervention
Computer nukes come pray with me
Before the war, the war, after the war
Before the war the war after the war the war before the war
Disestablishes human character.
Computer data composes World War One poet
Warren Penfield born Indianapolis Indiana
City of Indians in the Plains Wars after the peace
City of Indians going about their business
Indian poets in headbands walking on grid streets
Secure in their city of Indian architecture of cool concrete
Bernard Cornfield Investors Overseas Securities
Data linkage escape this is not emergency
Before the war before the last war
A boy stood on the dirt street in Ludlow Colorado.
The wind of the plain blew the coal dust under his eyelids
The wind blew the black dust down the canyons of the Sangre de
Cristo. The clothesline stretching across the plain
The miner’s cotton swung its arms and legs wildly in the wind.
A miner’s wife stepped from a tent with an infant girl
suspended from her hands. She held the child beyond
the edge of the wood sidewalk over the dirt the dust blowing
back along the ground like hordes of microscopiccreatures running.
The infant’s girl’s dress raised under her arms
she hung from her knees and underarms
so as to have her hairless child’s fruit expressed
for the purpose indicated by the mother’s sibilant sound effects
punctuated with foreign words of encouragement.
The boy standing there happening to be there remained to watch
shamelessly and the beautiful little girl turned upon him a face
of such outrage that he immediately recognized her
willing white neck companion of the old monk it’s you
and with then saintly inability to withstand life she closed
her eyes and allowed the thin stream of golden water to cascade
into the dust where instantly formed minuscule tulips
he beheld the fruition of a small fertile universe.
3
When the nights were bad, when the uncanny sounds in the woods kept him awake, when the crack of a twig in the pine forest was inexplicable or some distant whimpering creature sounded in his mind like a child being fucked he swore it was still better than going with the red ball. Whowhoo. Better to take alone whatever came. Soft web of night threads across the face. Something watching breathing in the dark a few feet away. He had heard of people having a foot cut off for the dollar in their shoe. It was still better. It was still better to take alone whatever came. Better to die in the open. Whowhoo. Lying in a city mission flop in the great stink of mankind was worse. Arraigned in the ranks of the self-deluding in their bunkbeds was worse.