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For You, Sweetheart, I'll Sell Plutonium Reactors For you, sweetheart, I'll ride back down into black smoke early Sunday morning cutting fog, grab the moneysack of gold teeth. Diamond mines soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you'll see an erected throne like a mountain to scale, institutions built with bones, guns hidden in walls that swing open like big-mouthed B-52S. Your face in the mirror is my face. You tapdance on tabletops for me, while corporate bosses arm wrestle in back rooms for your essential downfall. I entice homosexuals into my basement butcher shop. I put my hands around another sharecropper's throat for that mink coat you want from Saks Fifth, short-change another beggarwoman, steal another hit song from Sleepy John Estes, salt another gold mine in Cripple Creek, drive another motorcycle up a circular ice wall, face another public gunslinger like a bad chest wound, just to slide hands under black silk. Like the Ancient Mariner steering a skeleton ship against the moon, I'm their hired gunman if the price is right, take a contract on myself. They'll name mountains & rivers in my honor. I'm a drawbridge over manholes for you, sweetheart. I'm paid two hundred grand to pick up a red telephone anytime & call up God. I'm making tobacco pouches out of the breasts of Indian maidens so we can stand in a valley & watch grass grow. 52 N EON V ERN A C U L A R ...

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