I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas but not afraid to speak my lonesomeness in a car, because not only my lonesomeness it's Ours, all over America, O tender fellows-- & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy in the moon 100 years ago or in the middle of Kansas now. It's not the vast plains mute our mouths that fill at midnite with ecstatic language when our trembling bodies hold each other breast to breast on a matress-- Not the empty sky that hides the feeling from our faces nor our skirts and trousers that conceal the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin, white smooth abdomen down to the hair between our legs, It's not a God that bore us that forbid our Being, like a sunny rose all red with naked joy between our eyes & bellies, yes All we do is for this frightened thing we call Love, want and lack-- fear that we aren't the one whose body could be beloved of all the brides of Kansas City, kissed all over by every boy of Wichita-- O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me-- On the bridge over the Republican River almost in tears to know how to speak the right language-- on the frosty broad road uphill between highway embankments I search for the language that is also yours-- almost all our language has been taxed by war. Radio antennae high tension wires ranging from Junction City across the plains-- highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow lanes curving past Abilene to Denver filled with old heroes of love-- to Wichita where McClure's mind burst into animal beauty drunk, getting laid in a car in a neon misted street 15 years ago-- to Independence where the old man's still alive who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness and made the body universe a place of fear-- Now, speeding along the empty plain, no giant demon machine visible on the horizon but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge I claim my birthright! reborn forever as long as Man in Kansas or other universe--Joy reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods! A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear, imaging the throng of Selves that make this nation one body of Prophecy