U.S. 91-191
You barrel across Fort hall
Bisecting Blackfoot at a trifling speed
Birthplace of my mother
A trifle narrow for the Highway Defense Act
But the Blackfoot could take a new name each spring
And now the freeway circumvents you
But I won’t
Let you down
Nathaniel Wyeth
Typical Bostonian out of his element
We must wrest control of the government
From the dead ones who on it like
F does equal MA
and you’re a dead motherfucker
When I catch you on their side again
It takes so long for a good true story to go down
John Colter ran through Yellowstone park
With the Blackfoot Meriwether Lewis had
Mal aligned
On his heels 60 years before
Congress eyeballed it out
From under the merchant class on Doane’s request
That they not split the geysers
And waterfalls 6 by each
And capitalize on the discovery
Don’t shoot the fucking bears
I rage and remember to see
That the actual
Class lines are drawn and reported
As is, billionaires on bicycles
Loudly proclaim that we are
“All in this together”
Together maybe, equally so, never
Ratify their bullshit beat the Marx
Economics,
Eat
Your dog food, the old the ghettoed
On their leashes do
As they are told
Afraid to open the door
Not so much ‘cause something might in in on them
As that they’d miss something on TV
I wrote to McCord remember
The Lochsa, and the Palouse,
The Powder and the Poudre, 2
Days ago an old sow bear
Ate a young man from
Alabama in Yellow
Stone Park we call her
Old Faithful
Everything must become as a national park
free of capitalist endeavor
To have done with the beggarly labor
The organized merchants impale the people on
Let each subject to the push of desire be
Without the nagging postponed good
Of liberal full employment heaven
Words are not dangerous but avoid this class
Because they persist in misusing them
Is not deficit financing a dun on us
for their lack of imagination
Whatever became of Vanish’s riff
“The government is their idea
If we don’t out run out fight out think out class”
I’m not going to let you sleepy bastards forget
That the Democratic Party
Is the sworn enemy of the people
Or how pleased Stalinists were when
Lots of women and blacks
Showed up at their rallies
Dig a little binge of sanity
On your really rather have them
Misread it indefinitely designs
Back and across the rectilinear city
The afternoon traffic spans
Their quasi religious dreams of getting ahead,
Somewhere, mine while the getting’s good
Because they do come at you dying
Of nutritionally induced diseases
The germ theory still the pets of biologists
To be laid out here and there,
Chemical warfare being such an outright burn
Small pox decimated the Blackfoot
A knock at the door I decided must be the wind
Finding no one there
We are free to fuck up unilaterally
Get back into wild things
Make this territory free
This poem was composed in 1974 and originally published in Charle Kiot by C.S. Crowther at Folk Frog Press in Sandy, Utah. It was reprinted in Compostrella from Time Barn books.
Charles Potts is a counter culture poet from rural Idaho who now lives in Walla Walla, Washington. In the early 1960s, he spent time in Mexico, Seattle, and Berkeley where he was part of the rising literary scene there. Potts has been publishing since 1963. His most recent book publication is Coyote Highway (the title poem has been translated into Croatian and published in Croatia) from Least Bittern Books. He spent May 2018 in Croatia on a literary residency at Zvonainari.