Loon Lake Read Free Page A

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.

 
    W hen 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.
    It was the bums of the commonest conversation who angered him the most, the casuists of misfortune who bragged about the labels inside their torn filthy coats, or swore there was some brand of alcohol they wouldn’t be so low as to drink. Or the ones who claimed to be only temporarily down on their luck, en route to some glorious destination not where theyhad a job waiting or a family, but where they were known , where what they were did not have to be proved.
    I didn’t want these mockeries to my own kingship of consciousness, with all the conquests of my life still to come. How could I hope or scheme however idly in a flophouse with a hundred others, a thousand others, a hundred thousand others where the dreams rise on the breath and dissolve one another in a precipitate element not your own—and you are trapped in it, a dark underwater kingdom fed by springs of alcoholic piss and sweat, in which there live and swim the vilest phantoms of God.
    And strangely enough each morning I woke up still alive. In the lake villages and the