Chapter 3
Saltillo in Mexican mountains when the land shivers in shadow And the sun stretches through the air and beyond it With an intent to overpower what is closer to man-- The River-walk and the Alamo and between both where A Philipino in green shorts eats the grass Where sidewalk and road intersect. There is a city where I Thought I could find myself less lonely, And so I have returned home. Snow embraces Springfield's earth to its death. Under the sounds of the rolling drips of water in the gutter I am frozen, though fingers tearing apart the wet leaves I pulled off from a tree, wishing they had been Dry to grind and become the physical appearance of the wind. Cracked and peeled back from a boot a portion Of the snow is removed but refreezes more heavily On one area of the dead. I stand as an outsider Imagining myself to allow a job section of today's newspaper To become the thoughts that crash along in the mind of the wind. I need money but cannot find anything worth doing. To change from a person to a commercial function to eat...this..
This day I shall sleep away As the night. In Springfield, Mo. The Great God may also await for his eviction. Two hundred Indians in Houston bow down to Krishna as the gates Men lock around him are opened and closed. But in Springfield he probably awaits, His red-sock feet on his sofa As the furnace blows The Soviet flag on the wall before his feet. His walls may have many flags, And his mind thoughts of glasnost and communism Intermixed.. impractical thoughts He must sacrifice so that He can exist together more easily With the community of the dead, Unalone.
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Post-Annulment
Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes through Solipsistic muteness with an exhaltation startled and choking [People are play-things in one's reality! One must look Into other eyes or he'll be reminded that he is a user too] As the sun-god, Aten, blazes upon the terminal's Scraped concrete--its graven image-- Making the place an Amarna, The shelved rows of the poor men Hear the sound humbly grazing Through whispered reverence over The glass-speckled pavement In a gradual dying echo, A cigarette succumbs to the voice as Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people awaken; And a man spits toward the tire of the bus But misses. [Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!] And as he watches his own spit vanish From the hard crest of the world, And silently scrapes his lunch pail against A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale To bleed...and hoping it would bleed... He tries to remember the angles He and his wife stood to project The intermingled shadows that both Had labeled as their marriage. [Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters The child-man to be a destined societal function As he grows up in the family unit]
He enters the second bus: Its coolness sedating the skin that Overlaps his troubled mind. His thoughts pull together Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning. He feels a little pacified [Come to thyself, human, the refuge from lies!] He knows the shadow's intangible depth: Its vastness having overpowered him these months Until he could not reach the logic that told him To find himself outside its barriers. As he stares out of the window he wonders why she has left. How could she have left without indication When he has remained angled toward work So that he and his wife can stay alive? In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the windows Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance, Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell The idea of her not home, and legally annulled From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his Desperate thrusts--makes him feel sick. He gets down from the bus. He goes to work. He suddenly knows that he is not in love.
End of Project Gutenberg's An American Papyrus: 25 Poems, by Steven Stills