“ ‘Last time, I was just walking in the rain,’ he said, his hands and lips quivering slightly from the medication he takes.”
Slip a multivitamin pill in my mouth, grab a dish, fruit stewed two nites ago—
Ring Ring the telephone—the office, Bob Rosenthal, Debbie for Jewel Heart Benefit,
Ysrael Lubavitcher fairy returned from his Paris year
Edith not home, Aunt Honey leaving for Australia next week,
she had stroke & splenectomy 1942, long story—
David Rome preparing arts program Halifax during Sawang’s Shambhala confirmation
—Finally 3 P.M. I get dressed go to office couple hours—
Phone Robert Frank? Yup, he’s out, call early evening. I’m free.
January 23, 1994
God
The 18 year old marine “had made his Peace with God.”
A word. A capitol G. Who is God? I thought I saw him once
and heard his voice, which now sounds like my own,
and I’m not God, so who’s God? Jesus Bible God?
Whose Bible? Old JHVH? The 4 letter one without vowels or the 3 letter word God? G-O-D?
Allah? Some say Allah’s great, tho’ mock his name you’re dead!
Zoroaster’s Wise One used to be great, & Mormons’ version got absolute pedigrees & Genealogies.
Is Pope’s God same as Southern Baptist Inerrancy televangelists?
How’s that square with the Ayatollah’s Allah, Billy Graham Nixon’s on his knees, Ronald Reagan’s Armageddon deity?
What of Lubavitcher Rabbi’s God refusing land for peace exchange?
Is Yassir Arafat’s God same as Shamir’s? What about Magna Mater?
What happened to Aphrodite, Hecate, Diana many breasted at Ephesus,
round bottom’d Willendorf Venus older than Jahweh & Allah & Zoroaster’s dream!
older than Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha & the 39 patriarchs.
Is any God real? Is there one God? How come so many Gods—
Fighting eachother, poor Mayans, Aztecs, Peruvian sun worshippers? Hopi peyote dreamers round the half moon fire.
Am I God after all, made the universe, we dreamed it up together
or got tumbled out of the Chute onto the Planet, looking for progenitors?
I know I’m not God, are you? Don’t be silly.
God? God? Everybody’s God? Don’t be silly.
February 25, 1994
Ah War
Ah War bigness addiction
Alchemized thru meta-industrial
Labor-Intensive permanent tree
Crop protein energy system
recycling Urban Wastes
in Meditative Egoless non
Theistic Space
Lisner Auditorium
Monday, March 21, 1994, 8:00 P.M.
Excrement
Everybody excretes different loads
To think of it—
Marilyn Monroe’s pretty buttocks,
Eleanor Roosevelt’s bloomers dropt
Rudolf Valentino on the seat, taut
muscles relaxing
Presidents looking down the bowl
to see their state of health
Our White House rosy-cheeked dieter,
One last, gaunt sourpuss
striped pants ankle’d
in the Water Chamber
Name it? byproduct of
vegetables, steak, sausages, rice
reduced to a brown loaf in the watery tureen,
splatter of dark mud on highway
side cornfields
studded with peanuts & grape seeds—
Who doesn’t attend to her business
No matter nobility, Hollywood starshine, media
Blitz-heroics, everyone at
table follows watercloset
regulation & relief
An empty feeling going back to banquet,
returned to bed, sitting for Breakfast,
a pile of dirt unloaded from gut level
mid-belly, down thru the butthole
relaxed & released from the ton
of old earth, poured back
on Earth
It never appears in public
’cept cartoons, filthy canards,
political commix left & right
The Eminent Cardinal his robes pushed aside,
Empress of Japan her 60 pound kimono,
layered silks pushed aside,
The noble German Statesman giving his heart ease
The pretty student boy in Heidelberg
between chemic processor abstractions,
Keypunch operators in vast newsrooms
Editors their wives and children
drop feces of various colors
iron supplement black
to pale green-white sausage
delicacies the same
in tiny bathroom
distant suburbs,
even dogs on green front lawns
produce their simulacra of
human garbage
we all drop
Myself the poet aging on the stool
Polyhymnia the Muse herself, lowered to this throne—
what a relief!
March 24, 1994
New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
O homeless hand on many a street
Accept this change from me
A friendly smile or word is sweet
As fearless charity
Woe workingman who hears the cry
And cannot spare a dime
Nor look into a homeless eye
Afraid to give the time
So rich or poor no gold to talk
A smile on your face
The homeless ones where you may walk
Receive amazing grace
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
April 2, 1994
Composed at the request of Ed Sanders for his production of The New Amaz
ing Grace, performed November 20, 1994, at the Poetry Project in St. Mark’s
Church in-the-Bouwerie.
City Lights City
On Via Ferlinghetti & Kerouac Alley young heroes muse melancholy 2025 A.D.
Musicians brood & pace Bob Kaufman Street and practice future jazz on Rexroth place
Spiritual novelists sit rapt in contemplation under the street sign at Saroyan Place before they cross to Aram Alley
Loves’ eyes gaze sparkling on Bay waters from McClure Plaza at the foot of Market
Old Market itself as Robert Duncan Boulevard teems with theosophic shops & Hermetic Department Stores
& crossing Duncan Blvd.: First DiPrima Second Henry Miller Third Corso Street
Fourth Jeffers Street & Fifth on John Wieners Street the Greyhound Terminal stands
surrounded by Bookstore Galleries, Publishers Rows, and Artists lofts
Sightseers in tourist buses breathe fresh foggy air on Harold Norse & Hirschman Peaks—oldies but goldies
Ken Kesey’s name makes Bayshore famous as you barrel up past Brother Everson Memorial Stadium
Whalen Bridge sits meditating all the way to Oakland
Snyder Bridge connects the East-West Gate between S.F & Marin
Commuters crowd exhausted into the Neal Cassady R.R. Station on Corso
Czeslaw Milosz Street signs shine bright on Van Ness
Poet Jack Micheline gets Tenderloin, Philip Lamantia Tower crowns Telegraph Hill
where international surrealist tourists climb to see the view—
& I’ll take Alcatraz (to return to Native Americans along with Treasure Island)
April 21, 1994
Newt Gingrich Declares War on “McGo
vernik Counterculture”
Does that mean war on every boy with more than one earring on the same ear?
against every girl with a belly button ring? What about nose piercing? a diamond in right nostril?
Does that mean more plainclothesmen high on LSD at Dead concerts?
What about MTV—no more Michael Jackson, no Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues? Yoko & John no more Give Peace a Chance
Will there be laws against Punk, Generation X, the Voidoids, Slackers, Grunge?
Blues, Jazz, Bebop, Rocknroll? Where did it get countercultural?
What about Elvis’ Pelvis? Sonic Youth dumbed, Cobain’s screams banished from Nirvana?
No more grass on college campuses, Mushrooms stomped to death by the Elephant Party?
What about African-Americans? That’s a terrific Counterculture, & what about the Yellow Peril, Chinese restaurants? New Age Cooking? is Japanese Sushi too much Zen?
Sitting meditation, that be frowned satanic in Congress? Tai Chi, Tai Kwando, Karate, Martial Arts? Ballet? Opera, La Bohème?
Don’t mention us cocksuckers?! Is eating pussy countercultural?
Sappho, Socrates, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Proust in or out the canon?
J. E. Hoover’s name wiped off FBI granite in the Capital?
Poetry slams, is poetry countercultural, like a Third Party?
Is ecology pro or counter culture? Astronomy determining the Universe’s age & size?
Long hair, relativity, is Einstein countercultural?
January 1995
Pastel Sentences (Selections)
Mice ate at the big red heart in her breast, she was distracted in love.
Bowed down by the weight of nebulae he crouches underneath the hill.
A bat that’s bigger than your ear watches you sleep while you dream him there.
A round blue eye woke red lipped ’neath this century’s gigantic lightbulb.
Lantern-jawed Bismarck dreams a rich red rose blossoms thorn-stemmed through his skull.
In an oval blue womb a full-grown girl curled up eyes closed dreams her birth.
Big little people do yab yum in their ten petal’d yellow daisy.
Long hand over left eye Mother Sudan sees big bellied kids’ thin ribs.
In midst of coition a blood-red worm spurts out his heaving rib-cage.
The one eyed moon-whale watches you weep, drifting brown seas in a pale boat.
Thirty Kingdoms’ keys chainmailed down his chest, the Pope dreams he’s St. Peter.
Jeannie Duval’s cheek tickled by a Paris fly, 1852.
Puff a cigarette between skullfleshed lips, smoke gets in your empty eyes.
Sphincter-wound in his chest, he kneels and lifts both hands in surprise to pray.
All mixed up breasts feet genitals nipples & hands, both fall into sleep.
Adam contemplates his navel covered with a bush of jealous hearts.
Body spread open, black legs held down, she eats his ice cream—white sex-tongue.
One centaur palm raised thru earth-crust lifts a red live dog barking at stars.
Her dog licks the live red heart of th’ African lady curled up in bed.
Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.
Hands hold her ass tight with joy to lick & eat the blue star ’twixt her thighs.
Small pink-winged Lady-Heart hovers, rose-cunt legs spread nigh his stiff black dick.
Chic shoes rest in a black rose vortex of sociable fashion money.
She poses self-confident, blue sky & clouds borne in her oval womb.
Lady Buddha sleeps on blue air in a green leaf, knees raised spread naked.
Repose open-eyed on starry blue pillows under a star-roofed sky.
The black guy steps in the shade, glancing back at the sunlit boy he screwed.
Legs behind neck, arms hung down, Yogi’s solar anal navel burns red.
Blowing bubbles in blue sky he squats on his own blue bubble planet.
Star, bird, cane & big thigh bones, the ghost baby dreams life beyond the womb.
Regarding their long thick tails, blue demons wrestle with golden scissors.
He steps on his own breast lying in bed with red half hard-on.
Lady snails delicately climb naked thighs to stir his genitals.
Left forefinger probed into his own left hand proves a Doubting Thomas.
They exchange glances, a bee shadows her tail, a rose grows on his hip.
William Burroughs’ skeleton twists a towel, he’s got the bloody rag on.
The rose-girl kneels weighed down, iron tanks on shoulder, coccyx, calves & footsoles.
Horse stands on horse upon horse, lie back on top & take your forty winks.
He dives from naked sky past the sun’s nimbus into space-blue ocean.
Curtains part on a nail and its shadow, Samsara’s drama Act I.
The red lip’d fat billionaire appeals you try out his wee twat or dick.
Arms to neck, his tit, her belly, prong-twat, the President and his wife.
Pale green headless phantoms upside-down dipsy-doodle with thin hard-ons.
Lady Day bows her neck under a pyramid of oily black rocks.
Beneath breast-eyed wasp-beaks the pink rose opens, better get in there quick!
Inside her red womb the hermaphrodite fetus closes a third eye.
Wiping blood-black tears from hard labor, try holding up your big sad head.
Jealousy! Jealousy! Chin in hand he ponders the Unfaithful Muse.
Young Don Juan bravely displays his girlish red-sexed lips and eyeshadow.
Caught in the burning house of my brown body I fainted openeyed.
Big phallus, black womb lined with reddish flesh, look at the monkey we birthed.
One bird pecks her double’s breast on a ghost-white lingam’s unblinking head.
She flies down thousands of stone steps for years, aged climbs them all back up.
for Francesco Clemente
Château Chenonceau, June 24, 1995
Naropa Institute, July 5, 1995
Lawrence, Kansas, July 22, 1995
Nazi Capish
Catholicism capish
Catholicism capish
Catholicism abortion capish
Capish capish capish
Christian capish
Christian capish
Christian sin capish
Islamic capish
Islamic capish
Islamic Jihad capish
Zionist capish
Zionist capish
Zionist nationalist capish
Fundamentalism capish
Fundamentalism capish
Fundamentalism absolutism
Fundamentalism capish
Hunkie Honkie Aryan Frog
Jap & Gook & Limey Wog
Afric Chink capish
Nazi capish
Nazi capish
Nazi capish capish
Commie capish
Commie capish
Commie capish capish
Capitalist capish
Capitalist capish
Capitalist capish capish
Fascisti capish
Fascisti capish
Fascisti shit capish
September 21, 1995
Is About
Dylan is about the Individual against the whole of creation
Beethoven is about one man’s fist in the lightning clouds
The Pope is about abortion & the spirits of the dead …
Television is about people sitting in their living room looking at their things
America is about being a big Country full of Cowboys Indians Jews Negroes & Americans
Orientals Chicanos Factories skyscrapers Niagara Falls Steel Mills radios homeless Conservatives, don’t forget
Russia is about Tzars Stalin Poetry Secret Police Communism barefoot in the snow
But that’s not really Russia it’s a concept
A concept is about how to loo
k at the earth from the moon
without ever getting there. The moon is about love & Werewolves, also Poe.
Poe is about looking at the moon from the sun
or else the graveyard
Everything is about something if you’re a thin movie producer chainsmoking muggles
The world is about overpopulation, Imperial invasions, Biocide, Genocide, Fratricidal Wars, Starvation, Holocaust, mass injury & murder, high technology
Super science, atom Nuclear Neutron Hydrogen detritus, Radiation Compassion Buddha, Alchemy
Communication is about monopoly television radio movie newspaper spin on Earth, i.e. planetary censorship.
Universe is about Universe.
Allen Ginsberg is about confused mind writing down newspaper headlines from Mars—
The audience is about salvation, the listeners are about sex, Spiritual gymnastics, nostalgia for the Steam Engine & Pony Express
Hitler Stalin Roosevelt & Churchill are about arithmetic & Quadrilateral equations, above all chemistry physics & chaos theory—
Who cares what it’s all about?
I do! Edgar Allan Poe cares! Shelley cares! Beethoven & Dylan care.
Do you care? What are you about
or are you a human being with 10 fingers & two eyes?
New York City,
October 24, 1995
The Ballad of the Skeletons
Said the Presidential Skeleton
I won’t sign the bill
Said the Speaker skeleton
Yes you will
Said the Representative Skeleton
I object
Said the Supreme Court skeleton
Whaddya expect
Said the Military skeleton
Buy Star Bombs
Said the Upperclass Skeleton
Starve unmarried moms
Said the Yahoo Skeleton
Stop dirty art
Said the Right Wing skeleton
Forget about yr heart
Said the Gnostic Skeleton
The Human Form’s divine
Said the Moral Majority skeleton
No it’s not it’s mine
Said the Buddha Skeleton
Compassion is wealth
Said the Corporate skeleton
It’s bad for your health
Said the Old Christ skeleton