This is something which had come to me.
I didn't know where and then I finally figured out where.
It goes like this.
"One does not sell the Earth upon which the people walk.
A people's dream died there.
There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
And I've been trying to figure out what in my own life
was wrong with things.
And I finally figured out what is the matter.
And what is the matter is that, we, in this country
don't know about relationships.
And relationships don't always involve human beings.
Involved man's relationship to animals and his relationship
to the cosmos, man's relationships to all things.
And that there is a balance, and its cosmologically set.
When the balance is out of whack,
all kinds of possibilities take place.
And that, we, as Americans, had an extraordinary history,
primarily because there were certain kinds of imbalances
which went to the very core of things.
And I had been operating on these premises,
but I hadn't really thought about them for a long time.
And I wrote a poem called "Debridement," which I'm not
going to read, except for the one section which
I'd like to read to you.
But the poem is a very ambitious poem
because it places a tremendous burden
on the reader, in that he or she must know something
about American history.
And the assumption is that he or she does know.
And this poem is about a man who won a Congressional Medal
of Honor in Detroit.
He came back to this country from Vietnam
and couldn't get a job.
He was very confused about a lot of things.
And after being out of jail for about a year or more,
he's got a call from the Defense Department.
They asked him, had he gotten in any trouble?
That's what he'd been doing.
He said he hadn't gotten in any trouble.
A man called, the colonel called about 15 minutes later
and said, you've been selected as an awardee
of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Of course right after that he got a job
from Ford Motor Company, and was given a Thunderbird to drive.
He was given the task of recruiting young black men
in the ghetto for military service.
I'm going to read you two things.
One is a psychiatric kind of report
which always begins "subject."
And the other is something called "Mama's Report."
By the way, debridement means that cutting away
of torn or gangrenous flesh from a wound.