Marooned in Dallas
By Joyce
Carol Oates
(posted Wednesday, Feb.
11)
To hear the poet read
"Marooned in Dallas," click .
"Winning is
fun and it's the American way and I believe in it."
--Roger
Staubachbusinessman and ex-Dallas Cowboy
Waking at
dawn marooned in Dallas!On the twenty-ninth floor of a glittering pyramid!On
all sides canyon-avenues of glittering pyramids! Monuments to money!Money and
immortality!Money and immortality and blistering heat!Twenty-nine floors below
diminished figures scuttle!Descending twenty-nine floors rapid as a
fibrillating heart you can join them!You are choking in bus exhaust the
blackest in the U.S.A.!You are invisible amid the pedestrians of color!On
Commerce! On Houston! On Ross! Arkard! Federal! Field!ThanksGiving Tower
tilting to infinity!59,803 boots of Boot Town waiting to be filled!In the
Nieman-Marcus "flagship" your footsteps echo!Escalators soaring upward to
oblivion!Twenty-ounce T-bones juicy as newborn human babies!Giant gins! Mighty
Martinis!Guts long and hardy as expressways!Marooned in Dallas after death,
waking astonished!Blown along the pavement like loose pages of the
Dallas Morning News !Blown through canyons of sparkling fountains!Spring
water bubbling out of nowhere cascading to nowhere!In the historic Farmers
Market are giant cauliflowers, broccoli and beans! Texas-sized tomatoes,
sweet corn and okra and yams!The real world exists, it can be eaten!The
real world exists, it can be sold!Futures, shares, bonds, points!You've died
not knowing why, nor why Dallas waking lonely as you'd never known you
were! Why Dallas? --your soul swirling down a grate.Big D, the City That
Loves To Win!Come buy a ticket only $3 to the Sixth-Floor Museum (formerly
the Texas Book Depository) from which scowling Lee Harvey Oswald shot
President John F. Kennedy! Assassination site!
Grassy
knoll!
Kennedy Motorcade!
Parkland Hospital!
Love
Field / Air Force One!
Officer Tippet Murder!
Oswald
Capture!
Ruby / Oswald Murder! Authentic John Neely Bryan Log
Cabin!Philip Johnson cenotaph honoring JFK!Replica of Christ's Tomb at
Calvary!Swearing-in of Texas son LBJ!Fifty-two tons of cast-iron longhorns
stampeding in Pioneer Park!OBSESSION**GENTLEMAN'S CLUB***** Live Exotic
Female Entertainers Continuous ***O Corporate Cowboy America!Your love-need
misunderstood as greed!A hunger for sanctity misunderstood as rapacity!As if
great grinding jaws haven't their theologies and laws!O Dallas America's
conscience!O Dallas our miracle of Pentecost!O Dallas of refrigerated
verticals!O Dallas of Muzak-tombs!O Dallas the taste of fresh paper money!O
Dallas these are the days of vengeance, that all things written may be
fulfilled!O Dallas.
