1. Blitzbiz

                I was born to dive into a straw, swim through
                a straw, emerge from a straw—
                Sudden, glistening, the mediabreak
                made me drink ice tea in a sandstorm.

                Now even the core of a sleepmask digs
                in me for the place I love least to go. Ink-length
                away, its sky the color of manacles will
                hold my toes locked to another's fingers:

                count up, with them, the death on them. Memorize
                these faces propped against the hearth of an
                earthquake daily, pure propitiates. Sweet

                cathedral built to pyromania's standards,
                Icarus parachutes into the midst
                of a cockfight and look! wins his feathers back.

                
                2. The Outremerican Religion

                Emerson said I must know it all firsthand.
                I can't simply take another's word for it—
                no: I must go there, experience it myself.
                But in order to go there I need a car,

                need gas, need oil. Like Jack Kerouac
                I must cross the country incessantly using
                whatever-it-takes: like Elizabeth
                Bishop I must never stop traveling to see

                the world close-up, anti-vicariously, re
                my Outremerican masters drawn one by one
                down that road, out past that sea, unkenning

                the cost, not reckoning the loss of fossil
                fuels my ego entails in fulfilling this
                me-feel-or-fail, I-go-to-be philosophy.

                (Don't stop—
                                        indulge
                                                      my need
                                                                      for unmediated
                experiential
                                     direct
                                                 nonsurrogate
                —fuck periphrase!—to

                whom the immediacy of
                personal hands-on
                on-the-spot

                on-the-scene
                is vis  vis. Is Ism/ Real—
                Artless. Autobiographical. Allyouall.)
                

                3. Roadshow (Via Crucis)

                Now the Saved the Lost
                together must cross

                Outremerica . . .
                and down that downsome

                road, god we’re gonesome!
                Gas station stasis—?

                or 'Moral Crisis'?
                Hear our war, our prayer:

                Oh Christian Fathers—
                Reagan, Bush—give us

                a nation fit to
                drive children through.

                In herds,
                with guns at their heads.


                4. Garden of the Aediles

                It remains beneath the lids to be
                seen says memory. Vestige is mostly
                an orchestra led by a dowser,
                veiled, a water traced in testament,

                thirst for it heaps each drop with desert.
                False tooth fed into a rifle,
                that distance mows us down. Our
                lens weighs what, our faith? Outtakes

                droughttakes where pillars of smoke
                guide more children digging boundaries
                whose tourists long to obey

                any songbird's prey. High from its wells
                they soar, branches scorched in charcoal,
                limbs perched upon a pencilsill.
                
                Note:
                I can't resist appending just one quote from Our
                Redeemer Ralph Waldo: "Everything good is on the
                highway." (But don't forget to bring your Gulf creditcard!)

Copyright © Bill Knott, 2003.  All Rights Reserved.