Free The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly by Denis Johnson

enormous animals
    they pursued were all going to disappear.
    As we can see, they were right. And they were us.
    That’s what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing
    over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma
    of this Mexican baking and flowery incense
    with the kitchen as yellow as the middle
    of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed
    urchin child about the early inhabitants
    of this continent who are dead, I figure
    I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances,
    stepping onto the rock
    which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail
    and sink
    in the danger that carries us like a mother.

Movie Within a Movie
    In August the steamy saliva of the streets of the sea
    habitation we make our summer in,
    the horizonless noons of asphalt,
    the deadened strollers and the melting beach,
    the lunatic carolers toward daybreak—
    they all give fire to my new wife’s vision:
    she sees me to the bone. In August I disgust her.
    And her crazy mixed-up child, who eats with his mouth open
    talking senselessly about androids, who comes
    to me as I gaze out on the harbor wanting
    nothing but peace, and says he hates me,
    who draws pages full of gnarled organs and tortured
    spirits in an afterworld—
    but it is not an afterworld, it is this world—
    how I fear them for knowing all about me!
    I walk the lanes of this heartless village
    with my head down, forsaking permanently
    the people of the Town Council, of the ice-cream cone, of the out-of-state plate,
    and the pink, pig eyes
    of the demon of their every folly;
    because to say that their faces are troubled,
    like mine, is to fail: their faces
    are stupid, their faces are berserk, but their faces
    are not troubled.
    Yet by the Metro
    I find a hundred others just like me,
    who move across a boiling sunset
    to reach the fantastic darkness of a theater

Spaceman Tom and Commander Joe
    I will never be his father. He will never be my son.
    The massive sense of everything around us,
    the sun inside our heads
    in the blue and white woods, a mile away the sea
    hunched dreaming over its business—under
    the influences of these things
    I can’t keep us from drifting out of ordinariness
    on a barge of light.
    The princess he gives his mother’s name to
    fails in the invisible prison. The mangled
    extraterrestrials blandly menace us, the Zargons
    and such, who fall on a soft bewilderment,
    and they cry tears like a little boy.
    Our heartbeats make us go in search of these monsters
    and of the dead generations of the forest
    and of the living one, as we come up suddenly
    against the border of a marsh,
    where a golden heron startled by star-wanderers
    lifts with the imperceptible slowness
    of a shadow from what seems to be
    a huge reservoir of blinking coins.
    I can remember being seven years old
    in the morning and going outside to play.
    With the door of my home behind me,
    the people who loved me, the bowl of cereal,
    the rooms where the sleeping children grow up, pass
    smoking cigarets through their sleeping children’s rooms
    and enter their graves,
    I stood at the door of the world.
    You are my father. I am your son.

Willits, California
    Meadows that wreck with a solitude,
    tractors that have run down and died like toys,
    even here among you
    they are embarrassed and can’t hide
    from their obscurity,
    the trembling
    ugly young girls, their lips
    making that speechless consonant they always make
    in the clouded mirrors before they carry
    their roses into the flames of evening.
    And when they arrive among mainstreets down
    on which the cheap outdated names
    are sobbed by the marquees,
    driving and stopping and getting out
    under the avalanches of sunset and walking into stores
    as cool and still as pantries—they know how it is.
    History…Sadness…A bubble
    of some old error swimming up through the years,
    and gossip that grows stale and then is venerated…
    They know who we are,
    our every pain
    outnumbered by