0.
No world, nor any screens to
frame
The circle of the sight,
where white
Would yield to white; the
vacant
Stations of the Night let
slip their shapes
And walk, like waves, away
from fiction
And the
truth. Instead of speech, white noise
Of falling; instead of life,
the blank enactments
Of the Sea. Space opens up
no faster than the speed
Of light, the superclusters’ incandescent web of foam
Birthing the air and the
infinitesimal, solid worlds
And all their satellites of
ice and stone, and pouring radiation
On the living and the dead, relentless,
Blasting one enormous sphere
of fire forever, making days.
Making
Light and Matter, making King’s Lear’s sorry hand.
1.
Microbes in the youth of it,
the math of it giving out shapes,
infinitesimals exchanging their commands, all
fetch and drop transactions in the other
dark atomic coins, empty filaments moving
chains of pivoting atomic hooks
magnified by water: spores,
motes disperse abroad,
configuring the local field:
tissues of billowy slime,
plumes of seed.
Then the breast of the world lay long in bed forever,
when great creatures happened.
This or that came and moved and ended,
then fishes and the new.
Land came out and did what it is,
till on it all the forests full of them changing,
making it always from the previous time of the same.
Inland and out-to-sea.
2
The tortoise dives beyond the
gray reef happy
Darkness sucking on the salty
cold; makes
Deaf reptile progress through
the deep by
Nosing forward, green gray and golden,
For caves, for fish, for
seaweed, arbitrary
Scattering of excess energy,
undetectably elated
Swims the repeating shape of
the letter “S,”
Down and across the corridors
between elongated
Wall on wall of reeds, glad
of her liberty; listening:
“Hungry. Alive,” says the heartbeat, “Hungry. Alive.”
3
Think of it: maybe the cold
arrives all at once, dinosaurs
Respond with teeth and claws
and their usual murderous smile,
But it doesn't work that way
at all,
and the cold flows over and
through them;
the dinosaurs' curving necks
turn slow;
ice heaps up the gaps between
the crowded teeth,
the mouth of knives is spilt
into the stone,
black eyes curdle in the wind,
the green enormous scalp
twitches in the dark,
buckled jaws snap on air,
and crystals overwrite the
blank forehead
driven down and backward
in the white-light-flooded
eyesight
dotted with the bodies of the
dead,
eggs frozen open, high hips
creaking through the drifts
as they attempt to walk
athwart the climate and escape,
these dinosaurs, who swore to
last:
their final fourteen seconds of
the kingdom,
the liquid red remainder of
their blood
falls through the one heart,
huge, three-chambered and
misshapen,
the desperate alarm is gone,
and all desire
flickers into stone.
4
Swam we all duration of that hard
bright salty day, and then we came back out,
clams shifting underfoot down into sand,
the cold horizon blurred with spray, heard we
calling children floating cautious
hands entwined in mama’s hair that floated,
where these hot, diagonal ragged chains
of seaweed warmed the merging,
separate eddies and the clan beyond the long formation
pissing for the heat of it, was tired enough to drown
until the solid sand supported us.
6.
Here nothing happened. Here we played fuck.
7.
Killed and decided to stop.
8.
Mountainsides, give up your
frozen travelers
concealed
below the stone;
Long year, revolve on us with
gross disclosures of the Pliocene;
with
leather limbs of refugees, with icemen, bogmen,
Pharaohs from the powdered
dark,
Come
back and talk. About the death-world if
you can,
Or customs of the middle time, where records
lapse
and layers of the city’s stones
illegible run red, obscured by fire.
If you can tell about the death-world
hidden all year round under the
corn, that would be best,
But if the best that can be
wished is that we hear
your
memories of Earth and dawn, well, that will do.
9.
Man lies down
in the forest
sleep holds him
in its colder hand
doorchimes of the underland
shiver faintly,
clatter of tiny bells
wind rings.
Called to the cave
by shade, the bear
turns in the granite
lip and stares at rain.
Past the mountains,
gulls raise
the brimming glass of air.
The ocean stands,
layers of the cold
folded houses
fish run through
rings of weight
pass their eyes
each cold meter
no sailor knows
the labyrinth career
each red mouth,
plying its magnetic thread
miles below.
Dolphins bark
in the dark sea
voices hammer
the pumice vault.
Sailor steers
spoked wheel
rudder hears
sea lion and anemone
keel enters dawn
sea-man walks
under mast-trees.
10.
Night
Up the beach, the light rolls
outward
To the
shore, in spectral houses on the air.
Stones dumb at the hill’s foot, sleep
Leaning in
the spray. Where the glacier was,
Gulls rip through the dark;
where the great shelf
Breaks, ice weeps for its
melting; rain,
For the
fall. Over the moon’s false dawn,
Venus pours a resinous slow syrup of frozen gin:
Nostalgia, tremulous,
vanishes and strikes.
Aeneas’ ghost on Dido thinks,
and she thinks
Of Aeneas
and weeps, and Ajax of Odysseus.
This one for that one weeps,
and that for this.
Successive mornings flash,
strobe light
On the hapless sail, bringing
and seeing
The body’s ephemeral
architecture everywhere,
Pillars and halls, great
windows, flags, engines and terrible
Armed encampments, afflicted
in November rain;
Bright names afflicted in
disgrace, in sordid wars
And crass discovery,
auctioned documents
And lies
unnumbered as the sand. Night comes on,
Accelerates the helpless
resurrection of the dew;
Brings dim, cold homes to
speak their single syllable
Of fire; marks with the black
paw print one new day gone.
11.
For one dark bright fruit,
our mother Eve
And Adam her brother husband were betrayed.
Juice was knowledge,
ripe thick flesh was work;
Their human teeth tilled
furrows in its starry skin.
One moment’s creeping liberty
lost them bliss,
Brought them to sweat and
tears, to plough and cradle.
Blossom and fruit and leaf
melt into light,
Obscured by the turning,
flaming sword
Imaginary, deadly as the
storm of Heaven.
12.
Cyrus that rescued the Jews
at the Great Book’s end is dead.
Emperor Xerxes grandson of
Cyrus stands on the giant rock,
Surveying, from its height,
the Persian army teeming in the plain;
Weeps for the souls within
those glittering helmets down below,
(
train, running and throwing and wrestling by the
foreigners’ abandoned stream)
that in a century they will have perished, even if they
win this war.
13.
In the two-wheeled chariot of
bronze, the driver
stands in the shielded box of the driving stand
pouring his attention down the lane;
the cold air is full of wind and dust;
the mares are angry, then frightened, then angry again;
They go; they gather the rest
of their spirit and run.
Up in the metal car behind
the slender stand
the single man
leans to the eastern empty yard, shin by rail;
away from the ditch, the noise
around the fig tree, weighing two ugly plans,
pivoting, frightened but angry
(the
spearman half-fallen-out, at the right wheel’s twisted guard)
the chariot comes on, tearing the day with light.
14.
Jesus lying on the stone,
unconscious, dead, unconscious, gone
In Trauma
Room One.
15.
The name of it is death; the
sword is
the road and the wheel and the power,
the taxes hammering for blood; gold burning
spectral in the space above the debtors’ prison-
yard where toothless clowns drag manacles
in circles till they die. The city is airless.
Nothing can speak. Caligula.
16.
Three
men wise enough to get here on their own
Bearing
some bath salts, pepper, and a box of cinnamon
Rap at the wicker gate in the fog. Regrettably, the Child
Is
not at home, Mary explains to the tardy pilgrims,
Out of their element. He grew up already and did not get old
Before the soldiers got him. The story is too bitter for us now;
We
never talk about it; goats are to be fed and butter made.
Joseph
with his favorites in the little field walks all day.
Now
come, have lentils at the long bench by the well.
Some
other love than what you came to give is here,
You
are to late and there was never any God, and all
That
urgency and fame is come to this: hot stew,
The
breezes in the tiny grove, that twisted horn.
17.
Scene of Instruction
“Madrigals pour from the
stone
when the stag steps by.”
Not true.
“Sometimes the rain runs in
reverse,
and droplets ascending to their
Lord in tangled columns
regard the trees from above again and are glad.”
Not so.
“Often the fox will perform
tumbling, and jugling, and beautiful speeches
of love and duty
for the departed Senator
who listens through
the headstone.”
Oh.
18.
You learn in the commentary
that Brunetto Latini
was a figure of great eloquence and learning
who taught Dante about the possibility of being saved,
and taken into
Brunetto was unable to avail himself of that teaching.
He also wrote a book, in
verse, called The Treasure,
Il Tesore. And he
pleads, as scholars and artists will do,
With Dante: to preserve his
memory by reading his text
propounding the name of his text in the upper world;
And getting people to read
his book, called The Treasure.
This Dante does.
and Romans, who mix with them, and from whom Dante claims
descent.
Okay? So the Florentine population has 2 parts,
the Roman part which Dante associates with the Emperor
and with God’s plan for humanity
(in
which the Empire, Roman and then Holy Roman
is the engine of God’s justice and rationality upon the
earth;
so Dante loves the Roman element in the Florentine
population, and he despises this other one,
blaming it for the sins of
And these Fiesolans
who “shall become, for thy well doing,”
thine enemy.” Because of the stuff that you did that was
good
for Florence, they will hate
you.
See Dante reconciling himself
to his exile.
for “the grass,” which is Dante, “too far away” from the
goat because
the Florentines have exiled him. Too far away
for them to be violent against him.
Dante the member of a declining
aristocratic family resents “the new people,”
all these parvenus, new “gentlemen,” climbers, who
through the merchant economy
with all its lending of money for interest, buying and
selling on credit
have climbed from the ranks of the lower class into the
upper class, and become genti;
The new genti,
for Dante, “and their sudden gains, Have begotten in thee,
19.
No one is truly humble who
forbids himself every scrap of pride;
it is hubristic to think oneself capable
of total humility.
Hence Luther’s severity with
himself was really a kind of magnificent
vanity, caused by
his
forbidding himself pettier vanities.
The other Augustinians were
neither all depraved, nor all fools, nor all wrong: but they were all
humbler than Luther.
20.
The ceiling shelters and
obscures, John Keats.
The opaque walls, by keeping
you, have split
your leaning figure into (a) suffering flesh and (b)
reverie. So,
forward on the cratered hill
the young mind walks and gazes, gazes and goes.
The hand of Death is resting
in your pocket.
The window discloses and
opens.
Everybody’s face conceals the
psyche,
yet evokes the psyche too. As we know,
emotion is life and it destroys. Mood is sovereign over all.
Up the twig-vein flamingo leg
the impulse flashes and flows
and this is poise, O Miss Brawne.
Nowhere now, Eohippus
the Paleolithic, diminutive proto-horse
can neither ride to battle nor be wild.
Where we lived when I was
seven has become a vacant lot.
The last Great Auk was taken
by fishermen in 1844.
This leads to the idea of
some salvific elsewhere, to contain
all whose hold upon existence has been lost: say,
Night
continuous, ice, gold.
Vapors ascending the banded
gully,
then spilling horizontal toward the hills.
Maybe later, one of us will
devise a way
to alchemize some blood for us, because
without it the dead shades like yourself
and me must wander chirping barking
and listening in shapeless darkness
trackless and walking to nothing.
.
This is also for the women,
not yet born
eventually walking on Jupiter’s Galilean moons
reading and settling a complete understanding
of World War One.
21.
Murder
in the Ford Theatre and then
Unraveling
months drifting outward
Into starless, cold black pitch, the ship in fog.
Johnson and then Grant down
the great staircase;
up in winding smoke the old Republic
pours from the railroad lobby’s bright cigar.
No
more war. Now, drunkenness.
Blacks
free, to starve. Part of the
is
that 300 mile by 60 mile
strip of charcoal, Shenandoah.
Ruined
trains are burned; and crowds released
from prison, hospital, and war disperse
as
when the sudden hail scatters the bees forever, all
the
long-worked honey spilt; the queen down from disease;
the
hive disbands.
22.
Alfred the Great
Tennyson stood in a Turner
admiring the sunset.
He picked up his spyglass and
regarded a distant boat
Drifting by the margin of the
slate-grey sea, a flickering,
Discernibly oscillating
catamaran. Gulls about the lighthouse
Disturbed the poet in his
meditation and he started.
Then he turned on his heel in
the Turner and farted.
22
My Little Rilke
Circus animals have been the
subject of much of Modern art.
Rilke, the silk-peddler, lube-man, cardshark
dealt that hand several times: aristocratic zoo dwellers
Came in for one or two
adjustments to their axles; he gave free chiropractic,
He cut them a discount
“personals” ad. And
why not.
Let me never knock the
magician. And I, too, dig it.
That panther makes you think.
C’mere, Snoopy. Wanna drink?
23.
Popcorn (1916)
The kernels, saved from
germination in the dirt
find themselves jumbled in the bag, no ranks, no rows;
like soldiers herded into barracks from the countryside,
unknown to one another, divided by their dialects and clothes;
not
talking much the first few weeks, up there on the junk shelf.
A
dream, before long, has set in, the time pooling and leaking and seeping on
from the kitchen windows for what seems like decades of blank quiet, but
then the oil appears beneath the falling kernels, and the pan:
Shared
alarms, then singular immersion in the new,
then the old secret lost to the heat, so that no planting
ever, ever can go on, but after this reversal,
noise and exit and oblivion.
24.
Factory (1942)
The factory, whereto the aged horse is led, believing,
believing
In the great warm barn
bedecked with oats and straw:
The young mares resting in its separate stalls,
The owl’s reminiscent sigh,
The crickets’ climbing, scattered family;
The honeyed sunset melting through the boards —
Up the closing distance of the road,
Enormous cylinders emerge from powder-blue foundations
and escort to the sky
Converging streams of smoke, some white, some black.
The slow procession passes on its way
Stray hooves left blanching in the open yard
And teeth in ashes by the weeded
rail.
O memory of
fields,
And secret
passages of flowers on the further slope;
O legendary
speed of youth,
Ancestral,
cold migrations —
25.
Secret police everywhere
drink their energy drinks.
Giant ads depict cocaine, bright guns, artillery!
Pigeons that navigate the
trees behind the wrought-iron gate,
O dear folks out for air, whom I don’t know,
O cats in the trashcan,
meowing curvaceous phonemes on the wind,
What
will become of us? (Oh,
And did your stripéd spouse come back, Melantho)?
The waste of life in ancient
social crimes weighs on me somehow.
This is about 1963.
This is about Hamlet the Elder and Claudius.
This about
Watergate and who you can be. 1973, y’see.
This about my Dad and me. This is about me and Usury,
Sure, because the
Constitution says,
CONGRESS ALONE SHALL COIN MONEY,
But they never do. Rearmament is hurting my head; a zealous
cretin
Somewhere
is planning something lurid and mean and now the god damn
History of breakage from the temples of Kennedy’s face
To the Parthenon’s almost
denuded friezes melting in sulfurous rain
To this actual hobo-guy’s shattered gallon of gin, comes
in.
26.
Winged Rumor
Who rides the lightest coils
of air, rides eddies, sighs;
Rumor can swallow miles on the breeze your coat makes
coming to the hook.
Who believed this, that Tropical
Fantasy Cola came from the KKK,
equipped with enzymes specially
designed to sterilize the black man?
Who believed this, that the
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is the proof
of a real Jewish conspiracy to
eat the world?
Spider eggs in the bubble
gum, the U.N. landing on the
(any minute now!), the deadly
shoe of Kruschev on our heads,
While lead was really in the paint,
asbestos really in the 6th-grade gym,
gun-manufacturers really
building a bright new future for the gravediggers.
All through the decades after
World War II, guns were born every second,
All through the decades after
World War II, cars were born every second
Stocking the sweet, secret lyric of force
Sung
through the cold
Look out: look out: look out.
As if.
27.
Not the Center, Either
Salutations, Nation of Li Po!
Salutations, Great Brightness in the dawn!
Prodigious mastery of the
wooly Tao and the smooth Tao,
the Yangtze dammed and the undammed
old Yangtze alike,
Get on your olive-green bike!
Salute the mighty,
magic-elephant PENIS of
Exclamation-point of
lightning bolt! Export-impressive
dynamo!
Elephantiasis-BIG-PENIS-of-proud-Empire-Land!
Fountain of 1940’s rhetoric!
Food is magic.
Now that
Nuclear test GOOD for
soil. Earth last
forever. Say so in book.
28.
Grendel
turns over in the deep cold water.
Bobby, Cubby, and Annette
what dragons sheltered your
white limbs in coils!
Real and ravenous, the
scarlet blob expanding on the map
in Civics K-12
Stalin’s stain of terror
spreading through the past
wherein you wore those mouse-ear
hats.
Real and famished for the
globe,
the red blob becomes the
Disney-Dragon’s wings;
His tail pierces the clouds,
his teeth are spears;
states, countries, monuments go
down
before his charge.
The round black ears eclipse the sun.
29.
Utopia
Still there is the sunrise
and the snow;
black chestnuts thicken on the
orchard-trees somewhere,
Garnering fills the shed with
wood, the wall with stones.
Still someone gathers twigs in the invisible reaches of
the snowfield,
In the always
elsewhere fantasia of the righteous life expanding episode.
Cider making, ceramics, the long-term
storage of corn. Midwifery.
The care of
horses and their foals. Orchard keeping, canning.
Then Sancho Panza
turned to the Don and said, “your fly is open.”
30.
Prices boom and tumble down the day.
Dostoevskian approach to the hard day goes awry. Disgraced man
Returns to the ballroom and
turns a step on the empty floor.
Russian engineers dance on
the threshold of the hidden room
On taxi dispatch duty, and no air circulates from there into the booth;
No candy-cane comes through
the radio to feed the monster, boredom.
31.
A student on his year, a suffragette
at cards, a fly, all stare
Into the only thumbnail in the
universe, white and red again,
Shifting blood
into the spot. Privacy, hard-on, linoleum.
Edna Saint Vincent Millay, hard-on, privacy.
Not for refreshment, but the
proving of some damned
Insistent
point of honor all imaginary. Oratory for the floor itself,
Oratory for
the walls, utopian proposals raining on tiles and paneling.
Bunny
And made the introductions: Loneliness,
this is Hand; Hand, Penis;
Penis, I believe you know Come;
Come, meet Handkerchief;
And Handkerchief, you
remember Hand. Let’s have a highball.
32.
Rebellion mounts the
battlements and fades.
The head-sized patch of white
Hovers in
the photograph, behind the fence.
Badgeman, miasma, napalm.
Pity the fat heart stalling
in the Cold War.
Hell is a zone beneath
the foundations, sanitizing them with its separateness and supporting all from
beneath, in its solid shell.
33
Add Two Rilke Poems and You
Get The Zapruder Film
“We cannot know his legendary
head,
With eyes
like ripening fruit…
the dark center where procreation flared”
plus
“Washing the Corpse”
equals
The damned umbrella
Spreads and you feel a few
autumns’
Cold rain crashing on your
throat and shoulders,
The brightdark
steep intrusion, sordid
Lurid ravenous injustice
leaping from below,
Life rushing up and out
through
Oak leaves,
quietly tossing, dashing.
34
“Tis given out….a serpent stung me….thus is the whole ear of
The serpent that did
sting thy sovereign’s life now wears his crown.”
LBJ, you often took a shit in
the presence of a United States Senator.
You often asked the gentleman
from
To swim with you, and you swam nude, and they cringed and you smiled.
Don’t think a few decades
will be enough to let it all blow over.
Every American who can read
beyond the high school level
For the next one thousand
years will hate your filthy Texan guts like Nero
And Justinian, like Peter the
Great that throttled his own son,
Because you sold the world
from under everyone and made
Sad faces in the mirror when
it came back broke.
35
Nobody anymore, oh Lord, swing low.
That’s who plays touch
football now at Hickory Hill.
Beneath that other hill in
Leave flowers as it likes; a
Jew might place a pebble.
36.
Angie Dickinson! Meanwhile,
Edsel and Corvair! Meanwhile, ten thousand thousand
chickens piss
Constituents of ammonia up
the corridors of air, to rip the sky
Right out from over the coiffed
and kerchiefed head of the one and only
Lucille Ball! Who snacks on a lovely meal of porkloin made from
Half-ton
sows that coat the wall with blood on slaughterday.
37.
There walks a specter on the
American night, all right?
More lonely than the moons of
Mars, twin sterile boulders
Tumbling in the void; a ghost
of youth in black and white,
Another ghost behind him
gesturing, transparent, like
Film frames scratched and
overexposed, the confiscated
Cipher of bright splashing
That Regis Kennedy — no
relation, irony galore — stole,
And put it in his
pocket. The pair of brothers falls
Down deep into the vault of
what is gone, and death
Colder than the fishes of the
sea, upon his head and neck
Chained in the purgative
flames of his florid natural sins
His Catholic heart effulgent
on the dark, galloping to a halt,
To vault no
more the miasmic welkin of the capitol’s dark winter.
Slack reigns idle on the
unmanned animal; the famous horseman
Gesticulating, gasping
through the ancient neckwound, distantly
Thin
shimmering image of distantly speaking lips, repeating something.
38.
For me this gap of 5 years
between 1963 and 1968
Is what
39.
The moment his head hit the
floor of the Ambassador Hotel,
Miles away from that tiny
square of death, Nixon became
Too strong for his surviving
sad opponents, and the flame
That would incinerate the
hopes of Edmund Muskie and the rest
Began to
lick the walls of our unfinished dreamhouse.
40.
Good intentions on the New
Frontier persist,
Like prehistoric plants,
fossilized, eloquent
Fronds declaiming silently
urgent taxonomical details
With
gravity and dash, lifeless, radiant, over with.
Peace Corps and utopian
social longing, garrulous, last
Expansive, petrified
emotional stains up time’s sheer wall,
Like fern leaves in the
unscalable sedimentary
Canyons of the continent’s
uprooted heart, great
Shining impeccable
constellations elsewhere,
Urgently
waiting for something gone forever.
Traces of ethical moments
gather on the windshield, accumulate
Pollen, heaping yellow onto
August in loud, prodigal drifts .
After the inaugural snows had
steamed into the clouds
And animals on newsreel film
in zoos before your time
Had long since lain down in
the dust, anonymous,
The courtiers found greener
pastures, packed their bags.
Consider the President’s
photograph; the chair they threw away.
Consider him turning, in the
Garden, on his famous heel.
41.
Somehow it is mine, your fat
story.
I have no money. You did it all.
Before I was born you are
dead,
And at one layer of the gone
world
You are seventeen. In between
The honey and the hemlock,
fall
The shadows of the Graces on
your path;
Furies, Eumenides,
traces of ancient youth
And age, like ice beneath the
earth,
Roots it to
oblivion like the moon.
42.
If you have a time machine and
you visit a museum in the future
and the Tyrannosaurus Rex has a plaque under it that says
“Super-double-plus
Pre-Nixon,” you might want to get back in the time machine.
43.
Lime or, Oxymoron:
The Educated Consumer (after Adorno)
Picking out which of the limes in the grocer’s basket
is the greenest, the ripest, the worthiest, you finish off the thousands of
man-hours that went into making them all identical. Agribusiness has taken the three stages of
planting, harvest, and distribution and added a fourth, namely the struggle to
erase every difference between the specimens.
It has done so precisely because mass-market produce is aimed at a
faceless public of interchangeable consumers, who have forgotten both the
variety of nature and the possibility of living a unique life: and you need to
pretend that one of the limes is perceptibly better than the others, because
those limes in the basket are eerily reminiscent of the milling crowd in the
store — that greenest, ripest lime is you.
44.
Politically Useless Snowflake Epiphany
The
sparrow-falls at the antipodes show up in the sudden dream, explained;
the
unique snowflake in the obscurest island, harried in the random breeze
unfolds
its glistening cold equations to the sailor at the ship’s spoked wheel,
drifts
across the spyglass’ disc of white light floating in its pitch black tube and
is revealed.
45.
Maybe I should just regress,
reoccupy a warmer spot if I can find it,
Reclaim some swathe of my old
landscape, go back and try again.
I used to think that Hart
Crane’s ghost, for instance, could avail itself
Of my regard for him, to
benefit in some great elsewhere or appear
Right here. He never did
and pretty soon I had to let that go.
Maybe I could take some
illicit spiritual hike up a better hill,
And hypnotize myself into
believing God is real, and people
All
immortal for their good or ill. If I remember right,
Those were the two unscalable
cliffs I pretended to bestride
That disappeared when I woke
up. Unfortunate this
Metaphysics going nowhere,
this ethics floating on nothing,
Local
aesthetics and an uncaused explosion. Wise is what
I’d like to be, under the
volley of circumstantial gravel,
Birdshit of rejection, and the proud man’s puke contumely
Staining my marooned
preposterous dinghy’s torn sail.
In 34 years I broke some
eggshells and my assbone when I fell.
Whitman I was a sucker for; I
did like Wilfred Owen and made
“Pilgrimage” to Keats’ House
in Hampstead Heath,
Though I grew up in
For Dylan Thomas and went
screwball for Berryman and Schwartz.
Lost in organic ailments of
the brain these guys and I spoke
Though I was doing all the
talking and it wasn’t much to write
Home about. Talking to the wall, my little hands folded,
Using Jimi Hendrix for a
ladder to the stars, while secretly farting,
I told myself the great
unknown was room enough for angels.
Maybe if I dipped my head in