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Something must be said of nothing I am as queer as the conception ofGod I am the god and the heaven unless I scatter myself among the animals and furniture ofearth An Account in the Present Tense of How It All Happened I am about to close the refrigerator after removing a package of meat when I hear my door lock turning and a crew of men, without so much as first knocking, walk in. Theystridedirectlyover to the refrigerator , tie rope around it, hoist it upon a dollyand ride it out the door. Who are these people and why are they taking my refrigerator when there is nothing wrong with it? They are making some kind of mistake . Stop, I cry. Youare in the wrong apartment. Not one turns his head to look at me or to listen. At that moment, three men, a second crew almost on the heels of the first, stride in and lift up my television set between them and walk out with it. I scream for help. I pound their shoulders but get no response, as if they were made of wood. I scream and scream, and another crew is right behind the second, this time to remove my bed. I am going to be left with nothing, nothing. I am about to get on the phone to call the police when I notice that they have cut the wires and taken the phone with them. They remove dishes, cutlery, rugs,books, lamps; screw out the bulbs. They leave me an empty apartment and begin to tear down the apartment walls. They knock out the walls of the building itself. I flee into the street, just barely in time before they begin to attack the stairs and the elevator. Out in the street I see that it's happening to each apartment building on the block. All the tenants are milling around, with the few clothes on their backs they managed to grab, and are shouting at each other in panic and wild rage.Weare totallystranded; there are no police and no emergency crews in sight. The streets are beginning to resemble a bombed-out area, and we see that we will 703 have to fend for ourselves with our bare hands. There is a park nearby, and we begin to converge upon it. It has large, open spaces where we will be able to lie down and rest and perhaps make our beds there for the night with what linen and bedclothes we were able to rescue from inhuman hands. It's all over, it seems, that which gave us our comforts and pleasures. It's back to the woods and fields. Did anybody bring a knife or a gun with which to hunt a rabbit or a bird? We look at each other, beginning to understand. Midnight It's midnight, the house silent, in the distance a musical instrument being played softly. I am alone. It's as if the world has come to an end on a low musical note. Blue The sky makes no sense to me. What is it saying? Blue? That blue is enough? The blue of emptiness? A small cloud trails beneath the sky as if to make a point about its pride in being a body, white, welcome to the eye. The cloud drifts out of sight. In its absence, I will walk beneath the sky, slowly drifting in and out of streets and bars. 704 | Poems of the 1970s ...

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