Evacuate the Species Prayer

Like a pocket of railway steam in the morning, let us come home,
And eat lettuces & pontificate.
Free your televisions from their cages, let them out to be free to roam,
Let them play Jack Benny's violin, let them eat your grandmother's famous baked ziti,
And eat cabbages & recreate.
Can we ride this train towards Salt Lake City,
Or pay for it with pocket change or redecorate the White House with graffiti?

Like a pocket of railway steam up your nose, I suppose,
Orientalled & occidentalled,
I would dress up like a hero to rescue you, tight pants over my pantyhose,
Flying over Brooklyn like Whitman or Hart Crane the hobo,
Cemented like they were entitled,
Accolade the empty air bestow,
Don't you know the off-tracks, the lost train & stony loco-voodoo blow.

Like a pocket of railway steam, bespectacled westward,
Myopic but not nearsighted,
But some men take their railway liquor to the buffalo herd,
But some men sew a pocket below the hole in their pocket:
The rubber trees blighted,
Ediford's automobulb in its socket,
And boom. But some men take their troubles up in a crayfish rocket.

Like a pocket of railway steam at tea, let it be me
Who eats the spinaches,
Let us drink Hennessy thru Tennessee & set free our shackled teevee,
Open tributaries, meal to meal I'm skinnier & full of honey,
Until the minstrel finishes,
And out drops funny money,
Open tributaries of the great river, crossed & cross-eyed as Christ's Easter Bunny.

Like a pocket of railway steam, evacuate the species,
Take it all to Californo,
Exploring empty empathy toward yuppies & the doomed humble-bees,
Take these leafs out of the busted refrigerator car, make a giant salad by the side of the tracks,
Trade it for Hart Crane's porno,
Replace what the planet lacks
With girded iron & 1980's pop, & gird up for when the mothership attacks.

other poems in the prayer series.