And that I think goes easily into the title poem
of this book, The Nightmare Factory.
And this I suppose is a political poem of sorts.
"The Nightmare Factory."
I was going to say something about this poem,
I always forget to do that, because audiences
seem to have trouble getting it on the first reading.
So I like to tell you that it depends
a lot on what you're like.
I happen to be a big dreamer and a big rememberer of dreams
and I have very inventive nightmares.
And I can count on a nightmare week anyway.
And after a really particularly bad spell
of particularly ingenious bad nightmares
I had this fleeting daytime fantasy about how it happens,
which is that somewhere in some Detroit of the soul
there is this assembly line you see
and that's how we get our nightmares.
And they come out, you're seeing them, they're stored up
and they're assigned to us and we
have to dream through that batch while the assembly
line is getting the rest of them together.
So that's what the title comes from,
and I guess you really need to know that.
"The Nightmare Factory."
"These are the dream machines, the dream machines--
they put black ants in your bed, silverfish in your ears,
they raise your father's corpse, they stick his bones
in your sleep or his stem or all 36 of his stainless steel teeth
they line them up like the best orchestra seats.
These are the nightmare tools, down the assembly line,
they send an ocean of feces you swim in and wake
from with blood on your tongue, they
build blind sockets of subways and mine pits
for you to stop in, the walls slick as laundry soap
swelling and shrinking.
These are the presses--
they hum in nine languages, sing to the orphans
who eat pins for supper.
The whole map of Europe hears the computers click
shunting the trains you take onto dead sidings
under a sky that is packed full of blackbirds.
Night after night in the bowels of good citizens, Nazis,
and Cossacks ride, Klansman and Judases, postmen with babies,
stuffed in their mail sacks and for East Asians
battalions of giants dressed in GI fatigues, ears.
Full of bayonets.
Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak
from the airbrush maggots lie under.
If I should die before, if I should die.
In the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soap flakes
or tuna fish, wait, the undreamed of."