So what happened to the last frontier?
This is following that idea.
This is poem number one from A Coney Island of the Mind.
Can you hear in the balcony?
"In Goya's greatest scenes we seem
to see the people of the world exactly
at the moment when they first attained the title of suffering
humanity.
They writhe upon on the page in a veritable rage of adversity,
heaped up, groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies in an abstract landscape
of blasted trees, bent statues, bats, wings
and beaks, slippery divots, cadavers, and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the imagination of disaster.
They are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed.
And they do.
Only the landscape is changed.
They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires, false windmills,
and demented roosters.
They are the same people only further from home on freeways
50 lanes wide on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions
of happiness.
The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more maimed
citizens in painted cars and they
have strange license plates and engines that devour America."
[APPLAUSE]