And together we read Shelley and heard my recordings Of Tchaikofsky's Fifth Symphony in F Minor; And at the Finale I looked at him And wanted him to take me in his arms And tell me that he, too, felt the power in the music And the beauty gripping at you inside, But all he said was: "It was swell! But it doesn't get you like Benny Gooodman!" Alone that night I played the Symphony again, And at the loudest boom in the Finale Swallowed an overdose of veronal. ........AND TELL OF THE ARTS AND SOCIAL VALUES III Then came a vagrant: When I was sixteen, I ran away, Away from the overstuffed, winding-staircased house of my Victorian aunt, And became a Vag, a bum, in order To seek freedom . . . Went South and saw a wistful mulatto boy carting away the wasted pulp from a canesyrupmill To fight malnutrition and pellagra. Went West and saw fairhaired boys cursing in the blackness of mines With blood-caked lips. Went East and saw children with old men's faces dawdling up and down the shambling stairs of tenements And playing 'house' in the doorways of brothels. Went to Mexico and heard the muttering against the iron animals the landowners brought in to take the place of peon labor; And retched when the peons were lined up against a wall and shot for setting fire to the tractors they thought were animales de Diablo. Went to China and saw the ribs of the coolies bulging against the spotted skin As they pulled the grain barges up the rivers. Went to England on a cattleboat and saw scrawny girls bent in gray exhaustion Over the looms in the cotton mills. And one night I was riding across the Great Plains On the engine of the Rocky Mountain Limited Dreaming of a plump girl, with rosy cheeks, and a home with grassy meadows, creaking windlass, and darkies roasting peanuts in the mellowness of night . . . And feeling the bitterness well up inside, I sought freedom from the cold steel of the trains By relaxing my grip on the tender and falling beneath the wheels. .....AND TELL OF FREEDOM IV And then an intellectual: I was born with a thirst for knowledge, And as a child refused to swallow that stuff About Lot's wife turning to a pillar of salt, And Moses parting the waves for the Children of Israel. I set out to search for Truth, with the Emancipation of the Intellect as my lantern. I revolted against authority, Which held that I couldn't free knowledge from the bonds of inherited custom and tradition. One day, in a moment of insight, while I was wondering what IT was all about, I saw through the veil of mystery and the future: Saw the whole weight of the universe concentrated on each individual pair of shoulders; Saw men being conceived, groping, dying, And 'the earthworms hollowing out their skulls . . . with the lost cinder of the earth spinning madly on'; Our Earth: one iridiscent grain of sand on the beach of eternity; Page Four Saw men fighting the giant Oblivion through the few fleet moments of eternity by erecting shells: Shells of religion, shells qf love, money, lust, power, hatred, fear and patience; And refusing to erect a shell of my own, I wrote a letter of condemnation and dispatched it to the newspapers, And died painting my reflection in the mirror As the hemlock I had drunk initialed lines in my forehead. ---AND TELL OP TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE V And last came a limping and gnarled Jew: In grammar school the older boys used to torment me By prodding me with their fingers and mussing my hair And washing my face in the snow. Sometimes they would beat me, And when I'd be rolling in the ditch in the thorny tumbleweeds and crying in misery, They'd kick me any say, "Take that for killing Christ!" And I'd say, "I didn't" and they'd say, "You did!" and kick me again. When I got out of college I ran a clothing store for my father in Berlin Until Hitler came into power. And one day an Anti-Jewish group threw a stone followed by a flaming torch through the window of my shop And burned it to the ground. I went to live with my uncle; And one day of the year that I was thirty years of age My uncle and I were stealing along a street when a fanatical woman spit on me. Insane with rage, my uncle leaped at the woman, Only to be clubbed by a policeman. I became enraged, too, and for the first time in my life fought back; I had nearly succeeded in choking the policeman When one of his confederates clubbed me from behind. When they took me to prison, I heard an American newsman say, "At last a kike with guts!" And laughing at my little joke of cheating the executioner, I hanged myself from the cross-bar in the dirty cell. ........AND TELL OF THE PERSECUTED And the little caravan passed on, leaving the spirit about to be born unto the world feeling morbid and bewildered. With a cry of anguish, he turned and ran after them, shouting, "Wait, I'm going with you! I don't want to be born unto the awful world you speak of." Then the stately archangel stepped forward, and resting his arm on the shoulders of the newcomer, spoke: "Ah, my son, simply because these poor unfortunates were unable to find happiness is not reason why you and thousands of others can't reach chosen goals. You must remember that these five souls were cynics, who, as a mortal called Oscar Wilde once said, 'See the price of everything and the value of nothing'." "But why should I be born unto their earth governed by dictators, swathed in levity, bludgeoned with economic slavery, consigned to ignorance and retrogression, torn with racial hatred and persecution!" cried the newcomer in dismay. "Courage, friend," declared the archangel in soothing tones. "These men and all men dream of a perfectability which even the immortal deities can't create. When these five failed to realize the impossible zeniths of their dreams, they became broken cowards. But most men are content to strive towards perfectability and accept that which is possible even if the ultimate is impossible. As long as men have their dreams and their correlated imaginations the earth will make its way. When you begin life, aim for the stars and be content to reach the clouds." "Yes, but won't! find conditions there just as our friends here found them?" asked the newcomer, somewhat reassured but still a bit bewildered. "Not if you confine yourself to the natural limits of the earth-life, and if you dream of things which are at least partly accessible," insisted the archangel, extending his arm in a sweeping gesture towards the earth. "Now, go, my son. for time passes!" And so it was that another spirit was born unto the world. Page Five