When I crawled out of the padded pit of the commonplace
And poked my head into the giants’ land, the rarefied air,
I realized time was thick with adults like the familiar face
That was sitting back into the hollow palm of a motor car.
I saw he was the man with the diseased hands hidden in gloves
Who wrote advertising to while away the split-second decade:
He said through a sifting voice, “I have been theorizing now
For ten years, and there’s nothing I can do but lean on my record.”
I looked into my notebook for the house numerals of my actions,
But in it I found only the telephone number of a dead woman,
And while I was standing perplexed, voiceless among the fictions,
A creditor whistled that I come down from my bird’s-eye-view pronoun.
I said, I must take it easy, the surface here wears golden teeth,
The landscape kisses the feet, but trapdoors lie under the roses,
The beam in my eye is likely to fall, a thunderclap of brimstone:
So I went to the young man who was massive and looked like Moses.
But the bulky young man had a tenacious unsatisfactory wife,
Wrote vast trilogies on America, fell voluminously in love
And committed incredible suicide by hanging in a hotel room in Reno:
Civilization roared on into the darkness of the nervous system.
I ran to the worker with the one ear, in the first frost of events,
Who was applying the blow torch of mind to the callus of reality:
The radio spluttered platitudes in glittering chips on the lens,
“Forgive me,” he said, “but do you hear a big sound under the sea?”
I went to a man whose passion was buying libraries from the insolvent,
He was hiding out in his skin, the arsenal of all the factions:
He said, “Do you know of anybody—” I said, no, all the poetry books
Are lying like nightlights in the homes concerned with major issues.
I said, all bad things come to an end, even the answer-mongers,
Every day has its dog, and lo, around the corner lies the immense day:
What do I know of poetry among so many definitions?
This undoubtedly is life, and there isn’t a soul who wants it that way!
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