Illuminations: Evacuate the Species Prayer

The fourth illumination of the Five Prayers, "Evacuate the Species", the text of which was originally posted here. Click on the images to read the poetry full screen. When we're all done, the entire thing will be included in the updated version of Prophecy & Doggerel, as well as get its own $1 Scribd book! Others of this 'Prayer' poetry, including the illuminations for the Seven Prayers, can be found if you peruse around itwaslost's Department of Prayers. Thank you & Gesundheit!

Department of Hobos - Department of Bridges - Department of Hart Cranes

It would be an exaggeration to say we're working hard on the extensive endnotes for our illuminated poetry book Prophecy & Doggerel. But I got several e-mails wondering about the reference to "Hart Crane the Hobo" in the recent nonsense poem Evacuate the Species Prayer. The full line - "Flying over Brooklyn like Whitman or Hart Crane the Hobo" - is a reference to how both American poets wrote about crossing into Brooklyn, Whitman by ferry, Hart Crane by Brooklyn Bridge.

We had looked up Brooklyn Bridge poetry because for our William McGonagall projects. He famously disses the Brooklyn Bridge in his poem "An Address to the New Tay Bridge", which inspired us to set it to hot hip-hop beats & ignite a rap battle between Dundee's Tay Bridge (once the longest in the world) & the mighty Brooklyn Bridge. Turns out there's plenty of poetry about the latter, but none quite as doggerelesque as McGonagalls, & certainly none that call out challenges to lesser bridges. Gold Diamonds rapped a lyric by D. B. Steinem, Brooklyn Bridge at Nightfall. But Hart Crane's poem we deemed too good. The whole battle is at our Department of Bridges.

Hart Crane published The Bridge in 1930, two years before he jumped off an ocean liner at age 33. I was trying to echo The Bridge's westward train trip in "Evacuate the Species Prayer", & I couldn't resist the hobo passage in "The River":

Behind

My father’s cannery works I used to see
Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men—wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight

—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.

Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
—They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates
With racetrack jargon,—dotting immensity
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered sumac-stained or smoky blue—
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
—As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too...

I'm not sure is the breast is twelve-year-old Pocahontas's (as the symbol of Natural America), or some sort of Grand Teton. I wondered, considering the hobo connection, if John Hodgman had jumped on any reference in his "Here are the 700 Hobo Names You Have Requested". I don't see any Harts or Cranes, but there's plenty of Johns, Jakes, & Charleys. "Humpty-Dumpty Clods", from the poem, would be a good hobo name. You know there's a website called E-Hobo.com where people have been posting their illustrations of the 700 hobos. Here's #112 Lois "Charles" Ladyfingers:

Also, I just put up a another excerpt mini-book from Prophecy & Doggerel on Scribd, the poem Remember Artie Wongay, with illustrations by Grainne Proinseas (taken from her Beautiful to Forget travelogues) & Olaf Mary Mohammad:

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.