Putting my lenses in, I see No Man’s Land in the mirror—
Which makes me think of times in Tokyo so long ago
When, on some subway station platform, in a crowd,
Not finding a single person who spoke English
To ask how I could get to somewhere,
For a panicked several minutes
I experienced near-weightlessness and something quite like bliss.

Once, in India, I crossed a midday plaza—
This was Mumbai, then still called Bombay—
And there were maybe 25,000 people, myself the only white,
And no one in the mob of brown giving me a thought.
I walked invisibly through the Indian indifference.
I crossed across the packed brown Bombay busyness—
A man who wanted to be No Man’s Land, free at last.

Now listen, do the right thing, you’re a gentleman, be a gentleman.
Empty yourself of meaning
And be a man without ideas.
I went from Bali to Bombay, already sick with something,
From Bombay to Cairo, getting sicker.
Next, on to Tehran, where rooms constantly tilted.
Ah, Shireen, one-night stand of the Shah, looking as if

She had just stepped out of a swimming pool always.
Many swallow-tailed footmen served much caviar.
Among us in the tent was a spy of the Shah.
I was murmuring hurrah,
Once I learned the guest pretending to be drunk was a spy of the Shah.
Then came the revolution
And Reza Pahlavi fled, and rather soon after came cancer.
And then, poor Shah, came cancer—and looking for an answer.
My doctor in New York was summoned to Mexico City with others
From around the world, but they were not permitted to examine the Shah,
But they could ask him how he was feeling.
Doctors from around the world
Were not allowed to see the Shah undressed
And see the nothingness.

My celebrity GP treated heads of state and me.
One patient was Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli, who gave the doctor a Ferrari.
Nothing was the matter with me,
But something is the matter with me.
The Shah needed a splenectomy.
One would eventually be performed in Egypt but too late,
A spleen removal done by a cardiac surgeon, Michael DeBakey the Great.

I, too, took a sickness with me for three years around the world,
But the tropical diseases man at New York Hospital,
After months of tests, couldn’t find anything the matter.
It doesn’t matter.
I was looking at No Man’s Land
Between the trenches and World War I will never end.
Millions are already dead. Hemingway is writing instead.

The tropical diseases man who found nothing the matter
Became the second doctor of mine summoned south of the border.
Tropical-Disease-Man, by proposing
That the United States, on humanitarian grounds, let the murderer
And torturer into the country for treatment—which then happened—
Helped incite the calamitous Islamist
Takeover of the U.S. embassy.

I long for Hemingway in Paris.
I long for Paris and everywhere else that no longer matters.
I long for the stupid English and the French
And the trenches and the stench.
I long for A Farewell to Arms and the sadness as simple as a rainbow,
And rowing across the lake at night with Catherine Barkley, who will die.
My fellow Americans, cry with me for pussy days gone by.

Women sunbathe along the shore of a deep blue sea.
The eyelid of the day blinks on the blue to signify another tropical day.
A mind green as a golf course bakes in the hot sun and from the green
Rises a perfume of luscious and obscene
Pages turning and the woman’s legs open and the reader reads the poem.
Something is the matter with me.
I’m too happy.

Pound and Hemingway and Joyce in Paris lassoed
And branded the goddamned English language—cowboys in Paree!
Each fellow had his favorite café where he liked to be.
At the top of the stairs leading up to the street from the metro,
French riot police, squatting behind a machine gun on a tripod,
Waiting no doubt for some Algerian, swiveled the gun around to aim at me
On a lovely summer’s day in 1960.

I immediately looked behind me to show them you boys don’t want me!
I was being stabbed in the stomach, the room was spinning,
And, according to the tests, nothing was the matter.
Tropical-Disease-Man joked: “Maybe you got bitten by a shark in Bali!”
Twenty little schoolchildren in Connecticut were slaughtered last Friday.
Things happen even in Bali
When you write poetry.

Maybe the world got bitten by a shark.
I’m taking off from Newark Liberty International Airport.
The captain has turned the seat belt sign off while we’re still climbing.
I’m opening the emergency-exit door located nearest me
To wing-walk above the Statue of Liberty
And the bountiful chemical factories of New Jersey.
I’ve reached the altitude of No Man’s Land and I’m seeking asylum.