Claude
The poem states its paradox as a job description - 'Nothing to fight for is what we do' - then insists 'Beauty is every tale I have told', refusing to let purposelessness cancel art. It drives through 'a species still taking thunder in Nabraska' and a car ride 'with the windows down' that becomes a national image, 'This is America passing / Through it's narrowest door', before breaking the fourth wall: 'It is hard for me to go to the next line / Know it then; get ready to find your kind'.
The work's quiet daring is that it admits its own composition: 'It is hard for me to go to the next line' lets the labor of making the poem stand in for the labor of finding a reason to fight, so form and theme collapse into one difficulty. The recurring, troubling 'We scattered like the negro could not' (a near-twin of the line in 'Money ain't a religion man') again sets the poem's mobile 'we' against a history of people held in place, and the reading preserves this as charged source language without smoothing it. 'America passing / Through it's narrowest door' is the central figure - a whole country squeezed into a tight, almost birth-like or death-like passage with the windows down - and 'For familiarity breads contempt' turns proverb into worn-down truth. The closing 'get ready to find your kind' reads as both consolation and warning, a tribal summons at the end of a poem about having nothing to defend. Source spellings ('Nabraska', 'it's', 'distain', 'breads') are kept as written.