We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.

Sit, be still, and listen,
because you're drunk
and we're at
the edge of the roof.

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

AN AMERICAN SUNRISE We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves, We Were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to Strike It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were Straight. Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We Made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could Sing When we drove to the edge of the mountains, with a drum. We Made sense of our beautiful crazed lives under the starry stars. Sin Was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We Were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them: Thin Chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little Gin Will clarify the dark, and make us all feel like dancing. We Had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz I argued with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June, Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We.

went absolutely bat-shit. I could hear yelling and the unmistakable rumblings of an angry mob. Quickly, we made our way from the MGM sports complex into the casino,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound and were bandying it to and fro.

woke up screaming fuck the world

On the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.

"And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Des heard the dogs. They weren't barking, he realized, not exactly. They were swearing. And the rooftop rottweilers, faintly and almost plaintively, at this distance, were swearing back:
'FUCKOFF!' yelled Joe, or Jeff. It was almost a monosyllable.
'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCKOFF!' yelled Jeff, or Joe. 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF!

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky...

On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.