Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
      and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
            Our nation "of the fabled damned"
                                    or else . . .
      Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
            defined as man standing by his word
                  Word picture:      forked creature
                                              Man
            standing by a box, birds flying out
               representing mouth speech
      Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
            Different from a bad guess.
                              The war is language,
                                    language abused
                                          for Advertisement,
                                    language used
                              like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
      formulas for reality-
            Communism is a 9 letter word
                  used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
            -funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
                  handmedown mandrake terminology
                                    that never worked in 1956
      for gray-domed Dulles,
                              brooding over at State,
            that never worked for Ike who knelt to take
                        the magic wafer in his mouth
                                          from Dulles' hand
                                    inside the church in Washington:
Communion of bum magicians
                  congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
      working with the wrong equations
      Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control
            of the simplest broomstick in the world:
                                    Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
      before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
                              your magic errandboy's
                                    just made a bad guess again
                        that's lasted a whole decade.

N B C B S U P A P I N S L I F E
      Time Mutual presents
            World's Largest Camp Comedy:
                        Magic In Vietnam-
      reality turned inside out
            changing its sex in the Mass Media
            for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
      Generals faces flashing on and off screen
                                          mouthing language
      State Secretary speaking nothing but language
      McNamara declining to speak public language
            The President talking language,
                  Senators reinterpreting language
            General Taylor Limited Objectives
                              Owls from Pennsylvania
                        Clark's Face Open Ended
                              Dove's Apocalypse
                              Morse's hairy ears
      Stennis orating in Mississippi
                        half billion chinamen crowding into the
                                                      polling booth,
            Clean shaven Gen. Gavin's image
                                                imagining Enclaves
                        Tactical Bombing the magic formula for
                        a silver haired Symington:
      Ancient Chinese apothegm:
                              Old in vain.
            Hawks swooping thru the newspapers
                  talons visible
            wings outspread in the giant updraft of hot air
                              loosing their dry screech in the skies
                                                over the Capitol
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
      Flesh soft as a Kansas girl's
                        ripped open by metal explosion-
      three five zero zero        on the other side of the planet
            caught in barbed wire, fire ball
            bullet shock, bayonet electricity
      bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
While this American nation argues war:
            conflicting language, language
                              proliferating in airwaves
      filling the farmhouse ear, filling
            the City Manager's head in his oaken office
            the professor's head in his bed at midnight
            the pupil's head at the movies
                  blond haired, his heart throbbing with desire
                  for the girlish image bodied on the screen:
                                    or smoking cigarettes
                                    and watching Captain Kangaroo
                                    that fabled damned of nations
                                    prophecy come true-
Though the highway's straight,
      dipping downward through low hills,
      rising narrow on the far horizon
            black cows browse in caked fields
                  ponds in the hollows lie frozen
                                    quietness.
Is this the land that started war on China?
      This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?
      Are these nervous naked trees & farmhouses
                                    the vortex
                              of oriental anxiety molecules
      that've imagined        American Foreign Policy
            and magick'd up paranoia in Peking
                        and curtains of living blood
                              surrounding far Saigon?
Are these the towns where the language emerged
      from the mouths here
                  that makes a Hell of riots in Dominica
      sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipeh city
      Paid for the lost French war in Algeria
            overthrew the Guatemalan polis in '54
      maintaining United Fruit's banana greed
                                          another thirteen years
            for the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?

Here's Marysville-
      a black railroad engine in the children's park,
                                          at rest-
and the Track Crossing
      with Cotton Belt flatcars
                  carrying autos west from Dallas
      Delaware & Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff-
      a line of boxcars far east as the eye can see
                  carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies
            into the hands of rich longshoremen loading
                                    ships on the Pacific-
            Oakland Army Terminal lights
                        blue illumined all night now-
Crash of couplings and the great American train
                  moves on carrying its cushioned load of metal doom
      Union Pacific linked together with your Hoosier Line
                        followed by passive Wabash
                                          rolling behind
                        all Erie carrying cargo in the rear,
                  Central Georgia's rust colored truck proclaiming
                                          The Right Way, concluding
      the awesome poem writ by the train
                  across northern Kansas,
            land which gave right of way
            to the massing of metal meant for explosion
                                          in Indochina-
Passing thru Waterville,
      Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy-
            paper signs blowing in cold wind,
                        mid-Sunday afternoon's silence in town
            under frost-gray sky
                              that covers the horizon-
That the rest of earth is unseen,
                                    an outer universe invisible,
                              Unknown except thru
                                                language
                                                      airprint
                                                            magic images
or prophecy of the secret
                              heart the same
                              in Waterville as Saigon one human form:
                        When a woman's heart bursts in Waterville
                                    a woman screams equal in Hanoi-
On to Wichita to prophesy! O frightful Bard!
      into the heart of the Vortex
            where anxiety rings
                  the University with millionaire pressure,
            lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,
      and students waken trembling in their beds
            with dreams of a new truth warm as meat,
            little girls suspecting their elders of murder
                  committed by remote control machinery,
            boys with sexual bellies aroused
                  chilled in the heart by the mailman
            with a letter from an aging white haired General
                  Director of selection for service in Deathwar
                  all this black language
                                    writ by machine!
                        O hopeless Fathers and Teachers
                        in Hué     do you know
                                          the same woe too?