Robert Kern
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Travelling
Entire landscape south from Boston to N.Y. cruddy, with technological waste, wreckage as into darkness moves this train. An American, what can I do? Strange flat ponds still mirrors under still sky with grey-brown fur protruding in their midst - must be the rough beast that lives there. Can politics do this? What can I do, an American? A general throwing up of hands! The means of production rise up to thwart the ends. A thousand disseminated smokes re-gather in the sky to return to their blackened stacks. How can we go anywhere with all this luggage? In the lake, a quiet boat, a stillness prevailing. Material, it is not you! Absorb our violence! The great shopping centers light up the night.
* * *
In the summer of 1968 I became a vegetarian. Reasons: 1) To become plantlike. 2) To stop consuming. 3) To live like a member of the Third World. 4) To do it. I did it making friends among bushes and trees frowning on porkchops in the supermarket denying the environmental pressures plunking down roots in the earthly sources attaching myself to the ground loving the rain drawing toward the sun.
Enter, the merciless sponge of the System the wilderness going down revelation becoming habit all joy vaporized a withering. So I enter the world of consenting adults by day and by night shiver and thrill to rumors of the American Liberation Front.
