From "A Coney Island of the Mind"

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In Goya’s greatest schemes we seem to see
                                                          the people of the world
          exactly at the moment when
                   they first attained the title of
                                                                ‘suffering humanity’
                They writhe upon the page
                                                 in a veritable rage
                                                                       of adversity
                  Heaped up
                              groaning with babies and bayonets
                                                                   under cement skies
                     in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
                          bent statues bats wings and beaks
                                       slippery gibbets
                         cadavers and carnivorous cocks
                      and all the final hollering monsters
                            of the
                                      ‘imagination of disaster’
                    they are so bloody real
                                                 it is as if they really still existed

          And they do

                         Only the landscape is changed

They still are ranged along the roads
         plagued by legionaires
                                     false windmills and demented roosters




We are the same people
                                      only further from home
      on freeways fifty lanes wide
                              on a concrete continent
                                       spaced with bland billboards
                         illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
               The scene shows fewer tumbrils
                                           but more strung-out citizens
                                                                     in painted cars
                        and they have strange license plates
                 and engines
                                   that devour America