University of Nebraska
When I was asked to leave the University of Nebraska, I closed my checking account and packed my bags and bought a ticket to New York. The bus made many stops in many small towns--towns that lose their names. Night would come and the back of the bus was a tunnel looking over the passengers--the black and the whites, the old and the young, especially the old. The pathetic old, who couldn't afford the planes that the old should ride.
The bus moving through the streets and the reflection of the bus in the windows and the young in the towns. The many towns. At night we could see the towns from the freeway, distant and unknown, filled with the young, filled with the old. Past the horizons other villages nestle in the sweet little hills and valleys and the villages have children who will never know that the bus passes in the night, who will never know ...
Old ladies carry their bags and get on and off the bus. Old ladies who were young girls and slept in their youth with young boys. Boys who died. The bus moves past hospitals and graves. Holes filled with the young and the old, especially the old. Holes filled the used car lots and the men who will fill the holes and the cities burning with enterprise and hopes; hopes that will fill the holes.
The large banks and the mountains of glass, the statues donated to the dilatants, the BelAires and LaJollas and Fifth Avenues. The trash in the gutters, the man that sells the newspapers and the porn, the hooker and the delinquent, the young girls that fill the society pages, and the blacks who murder and fill the holes and the bus that fills the night with a light that doesn’t see.