Earlier this evening I was standing outside

the phone booth a drunk guy was hogging

across the street from the t.v. store and the

news came on about twenty different sets

but the sound was urban screech and hiss, it

being a warm summer night during as close

as we get to festival in this town, waiting to

call you.

 

The news from sixty feet looks as grim as

close-up when multiplied twenty times.  Seeing brown guys in fatigues from that distance could be anywhere or in this world everywhere, they always get the brown guys into uniform and it always gets me sad,

angry or frightened, depending.  Guys from the Kalahari, the vestige in battle dress hunting brown brothers on the south

african payroll.  Nicaraguan venalities

preparing with gringo hardware to pave

that nation of poets the pope shakes his

finger at.  Mongols, slab-faced, scratch Afghanistan uplands with a store-bought

fury nothing can withstand except maybe

yankee-bought surface to air hand-held

missiles also popular in Beirut where

brown guys blaze at brown guys

unrecognizable at sixy feet from Filipino

guys in army clothes blasting away at

Filipinos in army clothes who don't look

that much different at sixty feet from

Khmer Rouge fighting Vietnamese who

don't look much different from Arabs and Israelis who certainly don't look different

from Chileans fighting Chileans and Iraquis

fighting Iranians.

 

I'll bet you five bucks at this distance across

the street from the t.v. store during as close

as this town gets to carnival you wouldn't

be able to tell the difference between the

sound of fireworks just now started and the

sound of brown guys the white guys hire

killing brown guys around the world who

then at the end of their killing day go home

and can't stop their slow killing ways with

their wives and children.  The firewords are

echoing slap from building to building

around the centre of this place where I'm

standing across the street from the t.v. store

where twenty times over the bad news is

multiplied and it echoes from disaster to the

indescribable wrost.

 

Finally the drunk guy quits hogging the pay

phone and I can't tell you above the noise of

the fireworks how fine it is to hear the

sound your voice makes.