people looked at what was left

of the homes and crops, saying:

“Next year the roses will be more blood-red.

It was like that after the last war.”

And yet Napoleon—what did he know about war?

And does he look like an amateur today?

Did he ever see motorized units whirling

Over hard roads with troop replacements?

Or tanks giving cavalry the horselaugh?

Or a roving skyrider with a load of TNT?

Or an undersea boat releasing a torpedo?

Or a machine gun brigade landing from parachutes?

Or a rolling yellow wall of mustard gas

guaranteed to make them cry and mow them down?

Or civilian populations drilled for air raids?

Napoleon yes he could come back and take lessons.

And Sherman, old William Tecumseh, he too could come

back and say, “War is hell and stinks worse than ever.”

4

Think about anything cold now

for the sake of keeping cool.

Be a piece of ice.

Think about yourself as a long icicle.

Think about the winter northern lights,

shivering splinters of the aurora borealis.

Consider the Arctics: tell yourself a story

about someone just a little coo-coo

climbing the North Pole for the view

wearing an ice hat

where the nights are six months long.

5

Advice is cheap: in one ear and out the other.

And you can hear anything you want to hear.

And this is a free country and you can walk

right up to any other man and say:

“Excuse me while I give you an earful.”

And furthermore this being a free country

he can tell you when you are through:

“Where have I heard that chatter before?”

This happens every day in a time when

garrulous man never before had so many things

whereby to be garrulous:

billboards by day, neon signs by night,

telegraph, telephone, teletype, ticker tape,

phonograph recordings, electrical transcriptions,

extra extry uxtra newspaper mister the latest,

sound films, sound trucks, newsreels,

amplifiers, public address systems, loud speakers,

skywriting airplanes mentioning dog food,

undersea cables and transoceanic phone and wireless,

high fidelity transmitters of your slightest word,

your cough or your whisper in the little mike

going coast to coast and to other continents.

And the head of man, the noggin, the bean,

the reservoir located above the ears,

the top floor seething, swarming, alive,

the little garret sometimes half empty

and only a few crippled bats flying—

into these rooms of the human brain they launch

their loads of propaganda and call it good—

torpedoes of hate germs, plasms of passion—

unimpeachable giant facts glibly twisted into

shuddering fantasies of dripping maniac dwarfs—

honest questions of common men answered with lies—

unanswerable questions given slimy adroit answers—

stuffed prophets strutting their stuff—

minor mouthpieces imitating the majors—

one Manhattan bureau of public relations saying:

“We can make the people believe anything we want

them to.”

Nevertheless one Sunday morning leaving St. Joe, Missouri

a brakeman, a stinger, walks into the smoker

and flops himself alongside a fireman in overalls,