The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Online Free PDF Page A

feminine
    whispering of our names. My comrades fled,
    but I was healed by everything that happened,
    the midnight Rapid Transit stations
    of hand grenades made moonlight as I moved
    from life to life, getting off and shouting
    whatever the signs said, getting on again,
    received like lightning, changing everything.
    My body disappeared. The enemy
    knew me as a ghost who dropped a shadow
    the size of night and turned the air to edges.
    I am your grand companion of surprise,
    big-time harbinger canceling everyone’s
    business in a constant dream of all
    the starring roles and franchises the great
    Congressional Medal of Honor winners win.
    Wounded twice, then decorated more
    than any other in my regiment,
    I stood at home plate, vomit on my blouse
    and whiskey in my blood, and heard the dirt
    of my home town falling grain by grain
    out of the afternoon, while everyone’s
    rahrahrahs affected me like silence.
    The mayor handed me a four-by-four-
    inch cardboard box a colonel handed him;
    I threw it at the vast face of the crowd,
    screaming I wanted only the Medal of Honor…
    I lose the thread of my existence here.
    I see me strange and drugged against my will,
    telling my life story to a room,
    traveling the aisles of an asylum
    out there in Maine, among the aborigines.
    They must have set me loose, or I escaped:
    I see myself in a forest-bordered field,
    unchanged and wearing my uniform—
    free; yet somehow jailed by old desires
    and saying what a soldier says: For home,
    nothing. Comrades, for you, these hoarded rations.
    With four monstrosities in uniforms
    like mine, I pulverized guitars and wept
    for the merriment of many. Brothers,
    when shadows lengthen, and they lower down
    the American flag and close our government,
    another country rises like a mist
    by garbagey coliseums on the warehouse
    side of town to listen to that rock
    and roll: God speaking with the Devil’s voice,
    unbreathable air of manacles, a storm
    to bless your multicolored lips with sperm.
    We sundered them until they brought their bones
    forth from the flesh and laid them at our feet,
    screaming their lungs shut tight as fists,
    shedding their homes forever, leaving name
    and tongue and mind and sending us their heads
    through the mails in the night. We ran it past the edge,
    we gave them something everyone could dance to—
    whatever is most terrible is most real—
    the Bible fights, the fetuses burning in light-bulbs,
    the cunnilingual, intravenous
    swamp of love. Three times I died on stage,
    and the show went on while doctors snatched
    me back from Chinatown with their machines.
    We struck it rich. Without a repertoire,
    without a name or theme, we toured the land
    and eighty thousand perished. We were real ,
    but not one company recorded us:
    everywhere we went they passed a law.
    We toured the land—sweet, burning Texacos,
    the adrenaline darkness palpitates frantically,
    the highway eats itself all night, the radio’s
    wheedling bebop fails in the galactic
    soup near dawn; the Winnebago shimmers,
    everything tastes like puke, the eight-ball
    bursts, nobody
    knows how to drink in this fuckin town…
    One night I heard our music end
    abruptly in the middle of a number
    and looked around me at a gigantic silence.
    I felt the pounding, saw the screams, but all
    was like the long erasure of a wind
    calming and disturbing everything
    on its route through stunned fields of hay.
    My bodyguards tried with huge gentleness to lead
    me off, but I threw myself outside, rolling
    through a part of town I’d never seen—
    the flat gray streets looked Hebrew, and the windows
    held out the paraphernalia of old age,
    porcelain Jesuses gesturing from the shadows
    of porcelain vases, surrounded by medicines.
    A rain began. I strained myself to hear
    the trashcans say their miserable names,
    but nothing. At the brink
    of stardom high over the United States,
    untouchable as God but better known,
    I stumbled over streets