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I feel that my mental life
is over, permanently, that I shall literally have no more thoughts, writes Jenckks,
Jenckks, J.G.J. Jerry, writes, Man in a light-colored shirt and dark trousers with a satchel
slung over his shoulder and holding
a jacket in one hand stands in the path of an on-coming tank the tank jams on the brakes jerks to a halt rebounds on its springs nothing happens for 30 seconds or so then the tank turns sharply
to the side and attempts to proceed except the man sidesteps quickly in the same direction and the tank is forced to
jerk
to a halt a second time rocking on its springs gradually becoming still like an inverted rocking chair coming to rest there is another pause then the tank turns sharply
toward the opposite side of the street (to the man's right) and attempts to proceed and again
the man sidesteps quickly and stays directly in its path the tank jerking to a halt yet again there is now a pause of a good minute or so after which the tank abruptly bolts straight ahead flattens the man tracks over him drags him 100 yards or so before the strap on his satchel breaks
and someone has the nerve to say this constitutes a love poem
in fact it is a love poem
to escape the heat of a July afternoon in 1977 hot enough to soften macadam and make it feel as if one were walking on the surface of a fresh brownie
when crossing the street, Dagoberto Rebop and wife, visiting a New England college town in an effort to decide
whether he should resign from his job in New York and move back to the college town to finish an undergraduate degree program dropped some nine years earlier in the late 1960s, duck into a playhouse and buy tickets to the matinee purely for the air conditioning; the play turns out to be about an individual
who had an opportunity to return to college to finish a dropped undergraduate degree program but let it go by, his life essentially wrecked as a result, the sort of price people get asked to pay every so often, you tell me
tanks, what do I know of tanks,
tanks were in no way designed to print copies of Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader
in their interior though this does not guarantee they will never
be used for this purpose and the reason for this is that tanks do have a limited amount of room inside where a miniaturized printing operation could be set up and if hundreds of tanks congregated in a single location and some were equipped
with miniature linotype machines and others
with miniature printers' banks and "stones" and "sticks" for laying out the columns of type (in this case agate, the volumes necessarily bibelot-format due to the limited amount of space
one is working in inside a tank, each line of type comprising a thin rectangular wafer of (predominantly) lead approximately the size and thickness of a half-stick of chewing gum, the print projecting from the upper edge of the long side of each wafer) in page format in chases, and one (or more tanks) with a diminutive
hand-powered Gutenberg-style flat-bed screw press capable of printing in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 sheets per day (each sheet being dampened before going on the press, then hung up to dry after receiving the impression of the page of type,
locked in its chase
in the bed of the press, from which it is peeled off as carefully as a bandage from a wound, then, when dry, dampened on the verso and laid back on the press for the printing of that side of the sheet, each sheet no bigger than a page in a quarto volume),
street singer to appreciative audience in front of Unitarian-Universalist Church, August 10, 1991:
"Thank you more than I'll ever know,"
if then,
a formation of tanks was so equipped, tanks could in fact print
bibelot-format copies
of Tucker's The Marx Engels Reader, any fool can understand this;
at the end of each day the finished sheets
would be gathered in bundles and carried to a single tank, or series of tanks, designated as The Bindery, where they would be hand-folded with the aid of a bone folder,
cut, arranged in sections, sewn, bound, etc., etc., etc., any fool can understand this, there's no point in debating the matter--tanks, though not designed to print copies
of Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader,
could in fact do so,
the distribution and eventual sale of these tiny volumes, capable of being slipped into one's pocket without annoyance or inconvenience, making it possible, theoretically, for a wide and intensely politicized audience to read bons mots along the lines of:
 The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious -- competition.
and for all one knows tanks may in fact already be producing such volumes of Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader, in some remote location, where no one has noticed their presence,
which is to say where no one out for a walk in the area has happened to come across them, or if they have, they haven't bothered to climb up on one of them and bang on the hatch until someone inside opened it and inquired what was going on inside,
or someone has made the necessary inquiry and was informed of the operation but didn't give a tinker's fart about it,
teenage girl in red print blouse, khaki shorts, bobby sox, penny loafers to female companion in a department store in the Junction, August 21, 1990: "Liar, liar, your pants are on fucking fire,"
like this--a resentful woman with a figure to die for is out for a walk on a rainy December afternoon and,
discovering the formation,
climbs up on one of the tanks and smacks the turret with her hammer, assuming she has a hammer and in fact she will because she will be by trade a telemarketer, and when the hatch opens and the head of a whey-faced young man
appears in the hatch opening and the woman, with both hands in the back pockets of her more-than-snug jeans,
her palms flat against her backside, funny, it almost makes one's fingers tingle, asks What's going on in there? and the whey-faced young man says in a timid subdued voice We're printing a bibelot edition of Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader on a miniaturized printing press,
young man to young woman in a park after being hit by a baseball as he lay on the ground on his back, May 4, 1991: "God hates me,"
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