I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum 
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages 
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode 
palaces of gold, silver, and alabaster: — the summer 
greathouse and its folly together. Where shopping malls 
spread plywood and plaster out, and roadhouses 
serve steak and potato skins beside Alaska King Crab; 
where triangular flags proclaim tribes of identical campers; 
where airplanes nose to tail exhale kerosene, 
weeds and ashes will drowse in continual twilight.

I reject the old house and the new car; I reject 
Tory and Whig together; I reject the argument 
that modesty of ambition is sensible because the bigger 
they are the harder they fall; I reject Waterford; 
I reject the five and dime; I reject Romulus and Remus; 
I reject Martha’s Vineyard and the slam dunk contest; 
I reject leaded panes; I reject the appointment made
at the tennis net or on the seventh green; I reject 
the Professional Bowlers Tour; I reject matchboxes;
I reject purple bathrooms with purple soap in them.

Men who lie awake worrying about taxes, vomiting 
at dawn, whose hands shake as they administer Valium —
skin will peel from the meat of their thighs. 
Armies that march all day with elephants past pyramids 
and roll pulling missiles past Generals weary of saluting 
and past president-emperors splendid in cloth-of-gold, —
soft rumps of armies will dissipate in rain. Where square 
miles of corn waver in Minnesota, where tobacco ripens 
in Carolina and apples in New Hampshire, where wheat 
turn Kansas green, where pulp mills stink in Oregon,

dust will blow in the darkness and cactus die 
before it flowers. Where skiers wait for chairlifts 
wearing money, low raspberries will part rib-bones. 
Where the drive-in church raises a chromium cross, 
dandelions and milkweed will straggle through blacktop. 
I will strike from the ocean with waves afire; 
I will strike from the hill with rainclouds of lava; 
I will strike from darkened air 
with melanoma in the shape of decorative hexagonals. 
I will strike down embezzlers and eaters of snails.

I reject Japanese smoked oysters, potted chrysanthemums 
allowed to die, Tupperware parties, Ronald McDonald, 
Kaposi’s sarcoma, the Taj Mahal, Holsteins wearing 
electronic necklaces, the Algonquin, Tunisian aqueducts, 
Phi Beta Kappa keys, the Hyatt Embarcadero, carpenters 
jogging on the median, and betrayal that engorges 
the corrupt heart longing for criminal surrender: 
I reject shadows in the corner of the atrium 
where Phyllis or Phoebe speaks with Billy or Marc 
who says that afternoons are best although not reliable.

Your children will wander looting the shopping malls 
for forty years, suffering for your idleness, 
until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot. 
I will strike down lobbies and restaurants in motels 
carpeted with shaggy petrochemicals 
from Maine to Hilton Head, from the Scagit to Tucson. 
I will strike down hang gliders, wiry adventurous boys; 
their thighbones will snap, their brains 
slide from their skulls. I will strike down 
families cooking wild boar in New Mexico backyards.

Then landscape will clutter with incapable machinery, 
acres of vacant airplanes and schoolbuses, ploughs 
with seedlings sprouting and turning brown through colters. 
Unlettered dwarves will burrow for warmth and shelter 
in the caves of dynamos and Plymouths, dying 
of old age at seventeen. Tribes wandering 
in the wilderness of their ignorant desolation, 
who suffer from your idleness, will burn your illuminated 
missals to warm their rickety bodies. 
Terrorists assemble plutonium because you are idle

and industrious. The whippoorwill shrivels 
and the pickerel chokes under the government of self-love. 
Vacancy burns air so that you strangle without oxygen 
like rats in a biologist’s bell jar. The living god sharpens 
the scythe of my prophecy to strike down the red poppies 
and blue cornflowers. When priests and policemen 
strike my body’s match, Jehovah will flame out; 
Jehovah will suck air from the vents of bombshelters. 
Therefore let the Buick swell until it explodes; 
therefore let anorexia starve and bulimia engorge.

When Elzira leaves the house wearing her tennis dress 
and drives her black Porsche to meet Abraham, 
quarrels, returns to husband and children, and sobs 
asleep, drunk, unable to choose among them, —
lawns and carpets will turn into tar together 
with lovers, husbands, and children. 
Fat will boil in the sacs of children’s clear skin. 
I will strike down the nations, astronauts and judges; 
I will strike down Babylon, I will strike acrobats, 
I will strike algae and the white birches.

Because Professors of Law teach ethics in dumbshow, 
let the Colonel become President; because Chief Executive 
Officers and Commissars collect down for pillows, 
let the injustice of cities burn city and suburb; 
let the countryside burn; let the pineforests of Maine 
explode like a kitchenmatch and the Book of Kells turn
ash in a microsecond; let oxen and athletes 
flash into grease: — I return to Appalachian rocks; 
I shall eat bread; I shall prophesy through millennia 
of Jehovah’s day until the sky reddens over cities.

Then houses will burn, even houses of alabaster; 
the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up 
and hidden in a cave from the industries of idleness. 
Mountains will erupt and vanish, becoming deserts 
and the sea wash over the sea’s lost islands 
and the earth split open like a corpse’s gassy 
stomach and the sun turn as black as a widow’s skirt 
and the full moon grow red with blood swollen inside it 
and stars fall from the sky like wind-blown apples, 
while Babylon’s managers burn in the rage of the Lamb.