Poem - Diane Di Prima

In celebration of National Poetry Month.

Rant, from a Cool Place

"I see no end of it, but the turning upside down of the entire world" --------------------------------- Erasmus

We are in the middle of a bloody, heartrending revolution Called America, called the Protestant reformation, called Western man, Called individual consciousness, meaning I need a refrigerator and a car And milk and meat for the kids so, I can discover that I don't need a car Or a refrigerator, or meat, or even milk, just rice and a place with -------------no wind to sleep next to someone Two someones keeping warm in the winter learning to weave To pot and to putter, learning to steal honey from bees, ------------wearing the bedclothes by day, sleeping under (or in) them at night; hording bits of glass, colored stones, and ------------stringing beads How long before we come to that blessed definable state Known as buddhahood, primitive man, people in a landscape together like trees, the second childhood of man

I don't know if I will make it somehow nearer by saying all this out loud, for christs sake, that Stevenson was killed, that Shastri ------------was killed both having dined with Marietta Tree the wife of a higher-up in the CIA both out of their own countries mysteriously dead, as how many others as Marilyn Monroe, wept over in so many tabloids done in for sleeping with Jack Kennedy - this isn't a poem - full of ------------cold prosaic fact thirteen done in the Oswald plot: Jack Ruby's cancer that disappeared ------------in autopsy the last of a long line - and they're waiting to get Tim Leary Bob Dylan Allen Ginsberg LeRoi Jones - as, who killed Malcolm X? They give themselves away with TV programs on the Third Reich, and I wonder if I'll live to sit in ------------Peking or Hanoi see TV programs on LBJ's Reich: our great SS analysed, our money exposed, ------------the plot to keep Africa genocide in Southeast Asia now in progress Laos Vietnam Thailand Cambodia ------------O soft-spoken Sukamo O great stone Buddhas with sad negroid lips torn down by us by the red ------------guard all one force one leveling mad mechanism, grinding it down to earth and swamp to sea ------------to powder

till Mozart is something a few men can whistle or play on a homemade flute and we bow to each other telling old tales half remembered gathering shells learning again "all beings are from the very beginning Buddhas" or glowing and dying radiation and plague we come to that final great ------------love illumination "FROM THE VERY FIRST NOTHING IS."