Nobody Gets Off the Bus:
The Viet Nam Generation Big Book

Volume 5 Number 1-4
March 1994

Texts made available by the Sixties Project, are generally copyrighted by the Author or by Viet Nam Generation, Inc., all rights reserved. These texts may be used, printed, and archived in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. Copyright law. These texts may not be archived, printed, or redistributed in any form for a fee, without the consent of the copyright holder. This notice must accompany any redistribution of the text. A few of the texts we publish are in the public domain. For information on a specific text, contact Kalí Tal. The Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, is dedicated to using electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the 1960s.

Poetry by Steven Duplij

Radiation

My air--
Is the blinding flow of radiation.
I gnaw it--
And my life is wiped by X-rays.
No!
I don't want to decay to atoms!
Do I go that way?--
We are blamelessly squeezed.
The quiet and calm:

"What's the matter, don't be afraid..."
By what do you measure everything?
You cannot get round
The childish prattle
And trembling essence
By the faith in the degrees of lie.
So who is responsible?

Half--

Half-truth and half-conscience,
Half-argument and half-life.
Half-world?--Is not a worthy Destiny.
Half-memory?--Begone!--I forgot.

Like the purge of souls,
"Half-" melts the circle of meaning.
With a half-reproach a half-foe
is lying that he is a half-friend.

The sale with half-feelings.
Food is half-finished.
Half-husband, half-brother,
Half-full with half-love.

Half-power is half-freedom.
All are ashamed and make no complaint.
Rejoicing, half-caring
We're half-asleep--backwards again?

Dawn

The dawn
Has stained my meaning
with napalm.
Oh! No!
Do not betray
The steel of dreams--
Oh! Yes!
I am alive with the full moon.
The distance of essence
Is shining
With the salvation
Of a rush to Nothingness--
The morgue
of the pious
and guiltless
Striving.
The delight of the dream
Of loneliness--
The wheezing moan
of the exhaustion
Of evil--
To Sorrow,
To the naivete of Time,
To endlessness
And nonsense.
The inviolable
Soul's outcast--
The dawn.

Kalí Tal received, in November of 1992, an unsolicited package of poems in English and Russian from Steven Duplij, Theoretical Physics, Nuclear Physics Laboratory, Kharkov State University, Kharkov-77, 310077, Ukraine. Duplij is a particle physicist as well as a poet. He was born in 1954.