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Let Us
Let us
take ourselves aboard a bus
and travel to the dispossessed
and let us praise their dreamless eyes and hardened
smiles
with rogue words of truth
in the killing fields of their hopes
the slum wards and ragged towns and stolen farms
Let us
take to them a carnival
of our mad and scattered lives
Let us bring them the mountain
Let is give them the vision
of an open window, an unlocked door, a bed to sleep in,
a plate of food
Let us give
them the keys to the house of their love
Let us bare our throats tattooed with roses
our breasts sequined with diamonds
our loins hot with dragons
our hands and feet pierced with beauty
Let us come
to their dusty squares and drinking holes
with canticles of magnificent defeat
Let us deliver in their mangers
of pollution and penitentiaries, shopping malls and
tenements
the hard, beautiful birth of the heart
Let us bring renewal
Let us declare the death of despondency and tyrants
For I have seen our campfires pitched beside the roads
like fallen, still-burning miraculous stars
I have seen our bus voyaging to innocence
I have seen us poet-dogs tossed
the last decade of this century, like a bone,
after ninety years of science and war,
reason and corporation, art and Auschwitz
I have seen my vocation descend like a pen
to a page that can never be filled with enough truth
I have crossed a continent of despair
with a summons much older than lies,
and I swear to you, Poets
I live for greater than myself
You
street-latin Elizabethan hustlers,
I tell you time has come to deal death's passionate kiss to
kings
Time has come to strip for freedom
Time has come slut dogs, drag queens,
sadomasochists and criminals
to be Tom Paines, Franklins and Jeffersons
Time has come to write
the Constitution
with our poetry and flesh
Time has come
to costume up for Liberty and ride
with words like steel-tipped whips
into the soul of America
and rage there and sing
till the mouth of every starving child
is fed
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