The Blues

The Blues is when

the hurt is so heartfelt

that all that’s left is love.

Hamlet's Question

"To be or not to be, that is the question,"    Hamlet

"To be without description of to be."  the answer of Wallace Stevens

Rock song: Taking it in the Cash

 

I’m tak’n it in the cash

Tak’n it in the cash

Tak’n it in the cash

 

They used to use a mattress

Sometimes a cookie jar

I know where my dough’s hidden

No, it ain’t that far

 

I’m tak’n it in the cash

Tak’n it in the cash

Tak’n it in the cash

 

I went to the bank to get my money

Banker says: “It’s mine

Gotta keep the o’l bank open

Everything is fine.”

 

I’m not fak’n it

No, I’m tak’n it

Yes I’m tak’n it

Tak’n it in the cash.

 

Thank you Mr. Banker

Thank you Mr. Bush

Only thing I ask of you

Don’t push! don’t push! don’t push!

 

I’m tak’n it in the cash

I’m tak’n it in the cash

Tak’n it tak’n it

Tak’n it tak’n it

Tak’n it   no not fak’n it

Tak’n it in the cash

 

 

Tarzan in the Library of Congress

 

 

Swinging from thought to thought

Seeking the myth of the pith of the vine.

The right thought is an endangered species.

You have to be able to read the jungle.

The best thoughts were spoken by wise men

as a joke. A new paradigm is scary and funny,

like when you  finally realize why there’s always

a sock in that corner.

 

Read between the lines, the lips, the body language,

the billboard a person enters with, if the heart doesn’t

show right away even briefly, there’s a problem.

 

For example.

 

Meanwhile, Tarzan lazily watching the carnival

from the top of the canopy.

 

Laughing all the Way to the Bardo

I never played your game.

It scared me  for a while,

because I thought someone knew

someone knew what was going on.

Now I know that zombies in a 

shopping mall 

is not a metaphor.

I laugh with joy to be on the Buddhist Path.

My only sadness is you won't laugh 

with me.

On Poetry

My critics are those that want me to learn to write poetry 

their way, and I say there are as many ways to make art as 

there are to make  love…someone gets off on Van Gogh, 

someone else on Norman Rockwell… it’s not so much that 

some art is intrinsically better….it’s the art’s ability 

to communicate that measures it’s worth. Poetry 

uses language as it’s palette, but it is an art of communication, 

not of language, just as music is not an art of sounds 

and painting is not an art of paints.

I could be a “better” poet, and I am from years back, 

but my goal is not to be a better poet. it’s to write poetry. 

For many years I rarely shared my writing, but now that I’ve 

achieved a certain level of mediocrity, I’ve found that some 

people like some of my poems, so, my ambition has found it’s

natural limit. If I become a better writer, it’s merely a side effect.

Allen Ginsberg was a brave man, and one attitude he had 

towards poetry that I loved, was that everyone should write 

poems to each other, that it was amenable to community and 

sharing and fun and why not? There’s always the effete
faction that considers whatever art there is to be subject to 

their sublime judgment, but that’s a lot of horse manure.

I think Ginsberg’s “Howl” and either “The Love Song of J. 

Alfred Prufrock”or else “The Wasteland”, by Eliot, are at least 

two of the greatest English language poems of the Twentieth 

Century. Their subjects are exactly the same,and they each are 

 eloquent in their own style. The effect they each had was

vastly different. The intelligentsia ga gaed over Eliot in part 

because of the intricate weaving of classical references in his 

poems….you didn’t have to know Greek and Latin and a dozen 

other languages to appreciate his poems, but it didn’t hurt. 

Meanwhile he was addressing a world societal upheaval and
change that would be echoed down the line by Aldous Huxley, 

Orwell and others…the death of the soul in modern society. 

Eliot was one of the documentarians of that zeitgeist.

“Howl” was not the logical death knell one would expect 

would be the pronouncement on what had been happening 

historically over the previous forty years. It was a call to life, 

a battle cry of the sacred tender heart that would not die, and 

it arose precisely at a time when there were a multitude of ears 

ready to hear just that. “Howl” was a bombshell that helped waken
the children of the fifties from the engineered stupor that 

was the legacy of the process that Eliot saw.

And what does this have to do with the subject? Ginsberg 

and the Beats were vilified by a writing establishment that 

worshipped the style of Eliot, but not the substance. Truman 

Capote called “On the Road” “typing”, not writing. As the world 

changes, art changes, because art is “now”. Ginsberg and Burroughs 

were given establishment honors in later years, Mother Columbia

clinging the world renown successful artists to her ample and fetid bosom.

I only had one professor in college that said anything that 

made a lick of sense. He was one of my English professors, 

and he said: “If you want to be a writer, write!”

There Are Laws But There Are No Rules

The law of gravity or

the gravity of the law

are real because people do

exist behind bars so the fall fits.

But to control others my teacher

called "poo" (power over others)

which is just a bunch of crap most

creative eras of history were chaotic

McKenna's got the story if you want

to understand.

No matter how nice the roads are

a poem is better because you can't 

get here from there unless you know 

where here is.

"Stop" at the sign because something

might be playing through....

don't listen to propaganda,

its only reason is to fuck with you.

I Want My Now Now

Imagine a child that knew what now was

aside from being it.

Imagine an adult who knew what now was

in spite of their plethora of experience.

Oh, boy...this needs a snappy ending....

I think I'll eat the pretzel

in this dirty ashtray.

Alienated

Sometimes I feel everyone else

is from another planet how I got

here who knows I talk to them

and their words refer to things

but how they move about in  their

lives and take it all for granted

floors me.

Granted it took forty years to see

and I'm not saying my sight is clearer

than Jesus but anyone who would read

this would know there's something fishy

going on plain as day watching "the folks"

get off the Northwestern line at the Chicago

terminal for example the grey stream of

faceless flesh thought bound into the 

trough of the day.

I'm sad not angry if I'm going to have

an emotion is that progress worked it out

via meditation traffic accidents and 

pharmacopoeia wouldn't you if you saw the

paradox we're all in as good a cosmic joke

as I could have asked for none of us did you

have your own puzzle to grok good luck.