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And that I think goes
easily into the title poem

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of this book, The
Nightmare Factory.

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And this I suppose is a
political poem of sorts.

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"The Nightmare Factory."

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I was going to say
something about this poem,

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I always forget to do
that, because audiences

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seem to have trouble getting
it on the first reading.

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So I like to tell
you that it depends

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a lot on what you're like.

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I happen to be a big dreamer
and a big rememberer of dreams

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and I have very
inventive nightmares.

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And I can count on a
nightmare week anyway.

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And after a really
particularly bad spell

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of particularly
ingenious bad nightmares

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I had this fleeting daytime
fantasy about how it happens,

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which is that somewhere in
some Detroit of the soul

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there is this
assembly line you see

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and that's how we
get our nightmares.

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And they come out, you're
seeing them, they're stored up

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and they're assigned
to us and we

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have to dream through that
batch while the assembly

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line is getting the
rest of them together.

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So that's what the
title comes from,

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and I guess you really
need to know that.

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"The Nightmare Factory."

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"These are the dream
machines, the dream machines--

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they put black ants in your
bed, silverfish in your ears,

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they raise your father's
corpse, they stick his bones

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in your sleep or his stem or all
36 of his stainless steel teeth

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they line them up like
the best orchestra seats.

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These are the nightmare
tools, down the assembly line,

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they send an ocean of
feces you swim in and wake

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from with blood on
your tongue, they

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build blind sockets of
subways and mine pits

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for you to stop in, the
walls slick as laundry soap

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swelling and shrinking.

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These are the presses--

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they hum in nine languages,
sing to the orphans

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who eat pins for supper.

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The whole map of Europe
hears the computers click

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shunting the trains you
take onto dead sidings

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under a sky that is
packed full of blackbirds.

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Night after night in the
bowels of good citizens, Nazis,

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and Cossacks ride, Klansman and
Judases, postmen with babies,

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stuffed in their mail
sacks and for East Asians

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battalions of giants dressed
in GI fatigues, ears.

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Full of bayonets.

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Here on the drawing board
fingers and noses leak

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from the airbrush
maggots lie under.

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If I should die before,
if I should die.

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In the back room stacked up in
smooth boxes like soap flakes

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or tuna fish, wait,
the undreamed of."