A poem by Allen Ginsberg, Braniff Air, Denver—Dallas, December 3, 1974
Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver's day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts wobbly from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Bahrain, Venezuela Mexico
Oil that turns General Motors
revs up Ford
lights up General Electric, oil that crackles
thru International Business Machine computers
charges dynamos for ITT
sparks Western Electric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobile gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines,
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Stand of California derricks offshore.
I have been reading that the war hawks are being fueled for take-off, ready to bomb Syria or Iraq or Iran or someplace else that will look good on television and has a lot of oil (if lacking in oil, there are some preternaturally oily American companies that will gladly make their obscene profits providing substandard food and supplies to innocent troops who blindly assume the real enemy is the guys on the other side).
A Celebration of Reading 