If something comes
I swear I’ll hear the sound.
But then what? Can I run?
A dream will hunt me down.
“If something comes”
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The Ghost, Contented
Who once feared dying loves the done deed, death:
the body purged of breath,
relieved of the uncertainty of what comes next,
relieved of the need to expect.
Fear Dreams
Fear dreams, and sleep makes dreaming real.
I do not like to rest. I stay up late.
From the inchoate room sleep builds, where syntax fails,
I know one day I’ll find I cannot wake.
The Nightmare
Beast hallucinations claw my face
from inside, seeing now’s their chance:
the gate of sleep begun to swing, the beckoning escape.
Dreaming, dreaming makes them, makes them dance.
Dream Song #1: I Dream of Flying
O does your living make no sound?
The world is large for you to see.
They fly who never touch the ground.
The dream shall pass: it was a dream.
What are the words I have not learned?
I stand before you clean, too clean.
The world has turned before, and turns;
I am unmoved, but fly in dreams.
The Poet’s Lament for His Mother’s Death Has Won Another Prize
Most get an afterlife that isn’t much
for having had one’s soul pried out and kissed by death.
Oh, yes, it’s heady for a while, everyone suddenly
so sympathetic to one’s finished life,
so seeking lessons from one’s progress, or
so plucking-out-the-moral from one’s last decline.
It’s not bad while it lasts,
and everyone makes nice, but honestly
it’s mostly straight from gravestones and condolence cards:
“Beloved mother, Loving wife,” and how
she loved her kids, her husband, animals,
was pleasant always, liked to dance…
Most dead folk get that taste of it.
But later, after the tepid food and drives back home,
after some hours or months of reminisce,
one’s absences become less notable; one starts to fade.
And then what’s left of one? A nice obit, scrapbooked;
a stray memorial card stuck in a dresser drawer somewhere.
But this!
If there’s a heaven, oh! She’s gloating there for sure,
knowing she’s in it for the long haul now;
the mortification of her outraged privacy
is nothing to such pride! Such an I-knew-it!
Her own death, the source of his triumph!
The Pathetic Fallacy
David and Anne are playing chess.
The game of kings.
David’s thinking tactically,
While Anne’s mind is on other things.
Anne plays White, but loses ground
In the center, and her concentration wanes.
Outside the room, the easy darkness
Presses at the window-panes —
She softly gazes out at it
As David launches his attack.
“Your move,” he says, and jars her back
Into the minding of the game;
She had been wondering at the way
The darkness called her name.
“Avoid the righteous”
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
John 8:7
Deplore cast stones? Sinner, avoid the righteous;
Likely they are spoiling for a fight. Just
Follow Jesus’ counsel: in a throng, us
Common folk are safer with the wrongeous.
A Love Song of Alice B. Toklas
Mornings after, the company sleeping hard,
You were wakeful
With her arms about you
(and she asleep, not to be roused
because she did not care to be disturbed
by morning’s fitful fittings into place
till noon’s din roused her anyway
and she would dress and come down to the ordered house);
The floor cold till you found your slippers, padded down the stair
To find a brace of poets snoring on a single chair
A pair of painters sprawled upon the floor,
strange bearded men, one pic-a-devant, one goatee;
strange bearded men, one pic-a-devant, one goatee;
And standing at the parlor door you saw them heard them snore,
you smelled their wine and night-sweat smell,
And knowing all was well and would be well
You gathered up the moment to yourself
And let it go. No poet nor no painter you;
Yet that was something only you could do,
Let go and yet not lose,
And sniffing shuffle on on quiet feet
To go and shovel out the ashes from the stove
And put the whistling-kettle on for tea.
A Letter to the Late Allen Ginsberg
Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his “Blake vision,” an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems “Ah Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose,” and “Little Girl Lost.”
So tell me this one thing,
Old poet, mad saint,
What will it take to make the world strike me with its great magic?
What will it take to hear
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
Litany of drugs, poetry, masturbation, family history of insanity, criminal friends, jazz bars cosmic gaze smoky poet’s beard?
Is it typewriter, telegram, radio wave death that killed the voice of William Blake?
I process words, spell check, send beat poems by email. But I can type! send telegram! I seek out old radio shows, flat voices, analog tape hiss, all! I stay up all night! I embrace limitations! I cry up camp!
I sleep with many men, urge each one to grow out his beard!
I contemplate marijuana, ayahuasca, beer, peyote!
But alas contemplate as well a family unremittingly sane, professors, doctors, scientists, lawyers, old criminal friends respectable now, work for Boeing, Disney, partners in law firms,
Anyway these days you have to be good or you’ll never afford to retire you’ll have to work till you drop and who wants that?
And it’s all too easy to be good we have jazz bars you can’t even smoke in, we have digital TV, smart drugs, drive by shootings but they’re not somebody’s fault just bad luck, now it’s okay to masturbate everybody masturbates now it’s not even fun anymore, we have internet porn, mandatory capitalism, avant garde paranoia, sophisticated bigots armed with DNA and Right Guard
But we wonder what it’s all for, we didn’t tune in, we can’t drop out, we can’t get out the vote. We want something or other but what?
Only I seem to know what I want & I want what you had Allen Ginsberg
I want William Blake
declaiming Sunflower in my room
not to give answers to cosmic questions
but to show me he still can.
Bag of Anything 