CAMP GORDON

(Georgia 1953)

In recollection of the time in the hot hospital

down in Georgia in the United States

with pneumonia caught inhaling murder

and drilling with the jolly men

God had blasphemed against the earth:

they paid him back the same.

First sick call

where they believed my fever

and authenticated the fainting I had done

with such dark paradise of soul that day

marching to the tom-tom of the head-hunter sun.

Second the trouble with the human item at the desk

who asked me “your religion, bud?”

to fill a certain blank in case of death

and shivering I said None, before God none,

none by God, goddamit none

until they found a bed for me in a ward

full of his youngsters, black and pink,

the ones He jettisoned all over earth:

they paid him back the same.

That was a sweet pneumonia

although my orders were I must survive.

I did not eat the pills,

I rubbed thermometers, I groaned,

but slowly I recovered, I began to hear

the seven radios of the ward:

Love howling to the plik-plik of guitars,

trombones bleating, drumbeats raging,

preachers, sellers, quizzers, chatters,

trumpets cymbals saxophones: a soup of noise

their God had slopped down on the earth:

they paid him back the same.

At night I went in slippers and pajamas

to a patch of something almost grass

behind a door I shut.

I walked criss-cross and in a circle,

hearing honest insects chirp,

and while I walked, I sang against my time

cantatas I invented from remembered scraps.

I sang like a demented naked man

the cops haul off the street

while all the damsels laugh to see his human skin,

then I returned to bed, the lights went out,

and no one knew

I had then overthrown our consecrated State,

the duly constituted government of man.

Now I slept, awaiting orders,

between a cussing private and a beery corporal

God has fumed against the earth:

they pay him back the same.