Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, YOU CAN START THE POETRY NOW, OR: NEWS FROM CRAZY, by THOMAS MCGRATH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

YOU CAN START THE POETRY NOW, OR: NEWS FROM CRAZY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I guess all I'm trying to say is I saw crazy horse die for
Last Line: Start the poetry!! Start the poetry now!!
Subject(s): Crazy Horse (oglala Sioux Chief); Custer, George Armstrong (1839-1876); Irony; Native Americans; Poetry & Poets; Indians Of America; American Indians; Indians Of South America


-- I guess all I'm trying to say is I saw Crazy Horse die for
A split level swimming pool in a tree-house owned by
a Pawnee-Warner Brothers psychiatrist about three
hundred feet above --

You can start the poetry now.

-- above City Hall kind of sacred ground where they shot the Great
Buddha wild drags in the atomic parking lot but no good
gas seems I remember --

You can Start the Poetry now.

-- remember John Grass, University of North Dakota '69, did not
complete his thesis sort of half-classed Indian was too busy
fighting Custer to write he wrote last of the ten
million Mohicanos when the physicists began changing redskins
to greenbacks it wasn't

You can Start the Poetry NOW!

-- wasn't Gall who built all those slaveways after lifting the weight
of the guilt hair Custer's wasn't it Gall or Crazy
Horse Sitting Bull or Rain-In-The-Face wigged him it was
later they died on the tailfins it makes you want to shoot horsepower
capitalists who done it --

YOU CAN START the POETRY now!!

-- who done it it's between the gilt heir and the surplus value
grand cost of counting coup in the swimming pools stolen from
the Teton Sioux first ones I ever saw with built-in jails it's
capitalism unlimited the american Platonic year what I
can't get straight is the white antelope they're using for
money it's the --

START THE POETRY! START THE POETRY NOW!!

-- it's the quarters and halves or maybe the whole antelope Buck that
gets me it's the cutting up of the Buffalo Bread it's all them
goddam swimming pools full of shot horses it's Christ Indians
and revolutionaries charging full-tilt at the psychiatrists'
couches and being blasted with the murderous electrical hot
missionary money of hell-by-installments it's all of us pining
and starving surrounded by the absolute heavenly pemmican-charisma
that Geronimo invented it's the --
START THE POETRY!! GODDAMN IT!!
START THE POETRY!! START THE POETRY NOW!!


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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