America: In 65 lines to be yelled at 100 miles an hour while sitting on Mal’s piano[1]
Hey, America
Hey, map stuck on the wall of my cheap drizzly-damp apartment
Two years ago the empty shell of myself disappeared into Louisville Kentucky on that map
Soichi Akimoto, despised and remorseful second year student of English Literature who never woke up from a 20 year nightmare
Strokes the scratches on his Charlie Parker LPs
And Alex and Henry and Thomas, leaves of grass in the Second World War, the B52s that will never return…
Ah, the America I’ve never seen
The home-sweet-home of Jack and Betty
The America that killed my father in a sea-battle off New Guinea[2]
America where floods of Coca Cola surge into the business district
The America of Kirk Douglas’ dimpled chin
America the motherland of the Marx brothers
America where the sausages in hotdogs get groaning erections
America that says say goodbye to the dog that does clever tricks at the old people’s home
The America of great train robber Jesse James
The America of Natalie Wood whose clit I’d love to lick if I had the chance
America where Cassius Clay, a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, rides in a Cadillac writing poems
Hey, America of massacres in Vietnam
Hey, do you see Staten Island? Jane and her brother suck stick-candy and gaze at the beloved faraway skyscrapers
America, do you know why queer James Baldwin sleeps only with white men
America where heaven is a 5 dollar tab of LSD
Hey, lonely America where Nick works on manholes and digs his own grave
Where Jewish Ray sips 15 cent coffee at Horn and Hadart and wonders when to sell his mother[3]
Half America where Archie Shepp wearing an eye-patch blows his wild horn[4]
Hey America, where ageing star Bette Davis[5] has her last ever period and swims at night in a Hollywood mansion
Hey, Stars and Stripes live on forever
Hey, America, America
The barricades so near and far away
The stagecoach leaves town on a mission to shoot down the rising sun mark on a pack of Lucky Strikes[6]
Hey, camonna-my-house America
America the illusion, even though it’s there on the map
The orphan child of the faraway Wild West of the past
America the eagle that eats the darkness of death
That stands up with all kinds of utopia on its broad shoulders
It’s time to wake up and sing
Right now
Hey, America
[1] Mal Waldron, American jazz pianist who often visited Japan
[2] Terayama’s father died of illness in today’s Sulawesi. This is Akimoto, his alter ego, speaking.
[3] This looks like an anti-semitic slur, but in Terayama’s imaginative world, mothers were tradable items. One tanka poem runs as follows: “Carpenter town / Rice town temple town/ Buddha town / Tell me, Swallow / Is there a town for buying old mothers?”
Horn and Hadart was a chain of cheap eateries, founded in the 19th century and still going strong when Terayama visited New York in 1968.
[4] Jazz saxophonist, though becomes a drummer in some versions of the poem.
[5] Bette Davis would have been in her early sixties when the poem was written
[6] Reference to the red disk emblem on the cigarette packet, mixed with a reference to war against Japan.
There are several quite different versions of this poem extant. I have mostly used the version in the second book of the first volume of collected poems and shortened it by some ten lines.