Dylan Kelly's Overture

* * *

& he races home, his bags packed chock
con libros in languages he couldn’t read—
he hadn’t even read his own canon twice
on over as once he’d wished, thought he’d need:
& “diversity is more important now than ever”. Christ
is not the answer. Buddha is not the answer. Kerouacmight be, but is only part of a bigger picture—
a scene he painted in chapters of nothingness,
absurd, yes, but American youth is like this:
quantum, lifeless, an endless still-waiting-for-a-bus with less than
with what we came. Yet a gathering, a faultless fracture,
a collection a soulshine, a sainthood trapped inside a damaged man—that kind of thing. Then he unwraps the bandage from his hand
& sets his fingers free. He begins to write everything he reads.
Liberating, it is. & a Carlo Marx rings him
with a Brooklyn extension, but no one is on the end.
Settling in his seat, he begins to need ,
remembers how it feels to be a character again.a collection of soul-shine. No? No connection? :There’re no answers to this love, split or cut tongues to write it in—
No imagined script can symbolize one position,
or a poised & perfect stance, or a turning away perhaps, or a single word
forgotten beneath a bed, then remembered,
jerking the boy’s evolution to a spin
& resettling—       (ur Youth, Dylan).

* * *

Prologue

Dear Soulmate

* * *

I am tired.
I am tired of put-ons in dimly lit bars and overpriced domestic drafts.
I am tired of the hair gel I don't like to wear, and don't ever actually wear.
More, I am tired of this smoldering economy,
while weightless paper money goes up like flames in a Nazi literary bacchanalia.
I am tired of the dreadful, beer-bought conversations about jobs, and taxes, and empty,
meaningless putterings on New Orleans, or the earthquake in Haiti,
or something else we've become so jaded about we don't know how to feel.
I'm tired of the judging, the questioning, the interviewing, the importancy of parental consent,
as if age earns you no respect any more, and love even less of it.
Let's make some bad decisions and have it be the end of it: take off to Boston,
blow all our money on granola and shots. We’ll stop at Yale,
where you can call me Handsome Dan as we break into the quad
because the sun was falling on a hidden, Ivy League rope swing in winter.
Let's learn Mandarin and eat dumplings in Chinatown. There is a whole section
of Chicago whose tacos are yet to be appreciated by the erudite.
Let's put it all out front, never be afraid to tell each other a horrible thing—have fights
that end in Jamison Whiskey and stiletto stompings
of my favorite Marilyn Monroe print. Maybe I'll paint you one day,
but in an abstract way—more like a Picassoan Desmoiselle d'Avignon than a Mona Lisa,
but paint you nonetheless, and if we sell it for ten dollars we'll take it in ones
that we can put in the cups of the homeless—not for them, but for us.Maybe you'll let me grow a mustache, outdated these days,
and won't get embarrassed when we eat Indian food and I let it cake in there,
save it for later. If I really love you, I'll grow a people's beard,
a beard for the people, my first, and 27 is a good age.
Then I'll shave it off and go back to the mustache
and you’ll love me all the more for it.
Is there anyone else out there that owns an electric jumpsuit,
that just wants to run bonkers and eat up the world like a storm, a devastation,
to tear down every wall we come to and call that town Berlin?
That is willing to sit on a bed through the most wicked hours of night and talk and talk and talk
until there are static streams of lightning erupting from our heads, reaching out
their great lightning arms across the rooms, streaking down walls,
out windows, across the stars?That will turn and say with a Cheshire grin, "You're it!"
hiding for hours away in a closet full of toys,
and the imagination, and your own insanity,
and maybe you'll pretend a tea party there. When I find you
I will be sorry that I was late,
absolutely mad as a hatter and looking 10 feet tall.I'm beginning to think this is not the case.
There comes a time when one must resign himself with dignity,
but that is not to say without a fight.
There is love in this world. I know
because there is still music to listen to,
there is still the laughter of the children of our married friends to be heard and delighted in.
I know you are out there; when you get this letter, please write back.
I miss you, and, at very least, let me know that you are well.
I worry that you may have slipped into time's great beyond and I'll never know you again.Thanks.
Without Wax,
XXXX

* * *

Prologue

1: Dylan Kelly’s Great Fugue

*       *       *

Dylan Kelly not too dumb, but sometimes starry Dylan
not too bright       :       Dylan never sleep through
night. Dum dee Dum the drums rupture
in his young head, & he       listens till in-
the-morning comes, his dreams returned renewed
through daylight too. Later, he       not himself securemarch up the steps, pass the ceramic-
pot daisies—notices them.      Who was he
to think to rethink the old paradigms
in a sitting? No body       :       A mansion-party of Mind’s
best heads, & not only was he let in it,
but someone had invited him. “What seasare still to be charted?”       he asks Dylan,
& I say “plenty”. Who am I? An entire universe
swims in my brain.       :       The hemispheres
have never been fully understood. Bills &
what-not must be paid. What’s worse:
to me, music works as poetry appears.

*       *       *

77

I.

2: The Intervention of Fate by Music

*       *       *

A muse!—she works late nights,
Calliope, all business & charge:
caught ya sleepin’, Dylan, liquored up;
oh boy, she wokes ya,       & man, was you tired of that hard
knocking’ ‘gainst your temple, the light—
ya know, the staffy sister checked this year’s budgetagainst the stars—& touched by the invitation & a gesture
of kindness of beauty he’d never seen, white so pure
it’d be a moonlight’s envy, he rose
& she clocked him one
for “not having called or sent writing!” He knows
& rubs his nose & doesn’t care. What hero gots no love?But she didn’t leave him there, as the good ones don’t,
nope: she,       while he slept, drenched in sweat & sleeping sound,
sang, dipping ‘round him like a great bear,
& bed was a drop on a leave of grass, & we wrote
sexy thoughts in notebooks, & the heavens shook the ground
to catch a loving stare, lingering, looming about her pretty air,while the other in the room rocked
& weaved, weaved & rocked :

*       *       *

3: For the Love of the Epic

*       *       *

“I see you as in a Degas,” he’d once said
to shimmering her, “always dancing,
& if it didn’t disturb you so much to hold hands
I’d pirouette you about a street corner in the rain,
or perhaps an intersection at the Met—
the kind where two period arts meet—
& whisk you off on an adventure,
maybe to Philadelphia to see the stony Irish church,
or only as far as Woodlawn or Flatbush,
neither of which common place you’ve ever seen.“& you being you, & I being I,
if we each came to this life alone, by the route
that we’d be likely to take, at the time of year
that we’d be likely to come, I’d be sure to have come
by chance, & you on a whim,
dedicated, surely, on time, & firm,
& you may have sat next to him, or him
while I watched & wished & sipped my gin
& stirred the water black & thought
of Charon’s chariot, then Eliot with a Cheshire grin,
waiting till you sat to order again
never having said a thing;“Or might I, past a curl of smoke pooling
into a smoky purse, have pushed my way through
& told you I thought you ‘beautiful’,
or ‘adequate’, or any adjective in between—
have forgotten to say just what I mean?“I don’t know. But we are here, together,
& you’ve been draughted, crafted, perpetually in motion
yet never moving, & balanced & pirouetting in unison
with the chatter of talk about the bar—I mean,
let’s forget about art & talk; your voice
is musical, & the band stopped playing
that song you like—I mean, I think you’re missing
the point. There is no point. Go dance.
Me? No, I can’t. I like watching you better.Outside, a light wind once had ripped a cherry blossom from its limb,
& it still has to land to bloom.”

*       *       *

Now, the other cherry blossoms have all but long since fallen,
& there is no wind left to blow them;
the stench of summer sticks & lingers
like the mist that once crept about a valley floor.There is no hiding in winter, pleading
for death that there may be rebirth, kneading
the plurality of souls into a mould of one. What’s more:
green is a different color than it once was, & my fingers
are so from the working of that bread unleavened…—Oh, Erato, I remember such times, & she said,
“Virum non cognosco,” & in return, “I will show you,”
walking about streets blanker than that dead path Orpheus,
the mournful singer, knows so well. The cicadas bore an august fleece
about the air however, & so drunk were the stars,
that our chattered stumbling seemed pale & trite,
& my guitar unable to carry melody, nor could it weep.
There was one, inebriate in the driver’s seat
that slept, & there I heard him, beyond sense,
wake & scream & shout obscenity, &, tense,
I shuddered at the thought
that you might have landed in his bed.

*       *       *

Down Main, then Sarah, under Broad lights,
the statuettes about the square caused silhouettes
to quick & quiver mirage-like & shivering—o’ did we dare
drink coffee at the Grecian hof &, sobering, stare
only at the whites of eyes—only—
for is not the pupil too dark for soul-searching
& the iris too blue? Yours were wet.
Mine too, but I’d never let you know
that love could progress, lest apprehense,
to stand atop those hard & lonely steps
&, with a kiss, wave goodbye
without wondering, “Where will you be waiting?”.
If life were a ship, or a fleet, sailing,
I would man the helm & leap at night into the sea.& had we all the world & time,
Penelope, I’d never have held you
to be so faithful, held you
once more, climbed those steps & lied,
lay down next to you—that we would never
lock eyes & locks again.The art of Clotho is none for the likes of men,
& the sweat that pours from about my head
is a testament
to no crown at all.
The embankments in hell are just too steep
not to climb,       & just even enough not to fall.

*       *       *

“Dylan, relive the ages when we wove fleshy stems stiff into garland,
held ripe olives in our hands, poured libations on that ran
acrosst our wrists & through our fingers,
dribbled our feet, for fun—what were
you thinking then, Dylan Kelly, when my back was turned
& I know you could smell my hair
& the hyacinths did nothing to disregard you either?
Were you thinking of times when love
wasn’t ‘a flickering streetlight in a dank back alley,’
misty & straining & the hum & smell of sulphur;
to times when it rained
with no remorse, when Winter
meant the death of things, & Spring
nothing more than the end of Winter?”
We no longer speak of beginnings,
nor of ends, but of what we used to say
of beginnings, & what we used to say of ends.“I remember when you were the tarry planks of a bonfire of a mind, a man;
how that dry & yellow wood was a dangerous place,
but we trod knee-deep through dead & drying leaves
anyway, blackening them & the sky they lay against
with every step—O’
how we pined to be one traveler, even then;
& when there was a split, or a bend,
we would call out to each other, crying
‘Penelope, hold on tight,’ as we brought night
about the boughs, & heard a mournful wailing
but saw none in sight;“Those were the days when love was your religion
& yours was a religion of love,
when passion was never put on trial,
but meant the same as it does now—
I mean, as it did
before you tore the pages
from your book & scattered them, ageless
as they are, like leaves
about the blistery air.”

*       *       *

4: A Slip Back into It

*       *       *

Nightshade, drops of moonlight
on an open palm; alkaline visions
crystalline over hyacinth
petals & warm, soft dirt.
September brought the breeze back, beating
itself against his brow & the sockets
of his eyes & of his skull.Suddenly, a slow tune in a minor key burns
dry-ice-blue-smoke, flows in gurgles down the piano
from inside the heartstrings of the baby grand;
the ivory keys trickle, her caressing hands
putting supple pressure on the piano curves,
tracking the movement of the notes with her eyes closed—& then she held up an F-sharp,
kissing it with lipsticked vibrato,
& its unguent purple scent blew
through the low-lying mist slow, parting
in sandy, visible waves as she waved her finger
& the note reverberated throughout the air,
& onto the floor, taking me to a moment…—

*       *       *

The ferric paint peels blood-red as though the scene were
given bless by Mars—& it was—the palisading pickets untouched
not for lack of faith, but fear. I’ve been here, I’m sure
in Mind some year before: yes, I know the Roman iron archway,
rusted from buttress to bottom, leaning on the dead-end partition;
the Dionysus twins ponder the alchemy of moss mixed with acid rain—incenses linger— I politely pick a gracious grape
from her headdress, catch a golden curl before it crumbles,
as every woman collects her life in granite mortar—dust…;
Orr leans silent in a shaft of stone, guards the path
to the crystal tower where hangs the blunted sword inside the bell
& a copper cupideon, peeping, shows his blank eyes, his bent bow,is green with envy—the blazing tip ‘his broken wing
conceals his emptiness, is the only part of him anymore
that glows, & only in a ray of phase-yellow sun peering
in intermittent cords through a ferrous morning doom;
the joker, as myriad as one can be, pocked in cement,
drips with mad tears of ecstatic lament—the mist grows dense here, its scent more playful,
more alluring—makes my spine tingle—
presenting himself with the chilling jingle
of a three-combed cap:
the sound o’ the fool’s card
changing hands again;& the country courtyard is no less symbolic; massive,
pointed, opal danes guard the unimpressive foyer—cherubim deliver
gifts of grape & stalks of grain in pairs along the row—
a ring of smoke inscribes itself
among the clean corners of brush, & through—
putts of mist fall & roll along the floor,dilapidate into dew from the altar-cover, glowing
pallid, moist as grey-eyed Athena longing, wet,
watching Penelope weep, rejoice—a snarl sweeps towards—
the grains of sand beneath my feet the size of orbs, as neither
blood nor wine have graced these decrepit walls in any recent
past, presents that might’ve changed our future course,
but no, we’ve consumed all of the sacraments, out of hambre,
because we were hungry—drenching two man-sized busts of Panic
straining their necks to see—they too look back in fear—I, knowing,
open the soft, wooden shutter doors, &,
as in every dream I’ve ever had,
there she sat alone, playing…—       :

*       *       *

5: Calliope’s Love Song

*       *       *

The joker, the baker, the girl at Wannamaker’s,
the butcher, the hooker, the seer, the looker;
the old & the young, the reckless & good,
The Catholics, the Jews, & Muslims & Quakers;The liberal conservative, the compassionate moderate,
the speechwriter, the soldier, the man with a cup;
the taxman, the sailor, the poet in love,
Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, & Kurt Vonnegut;The editor of The Daily, the lawyer at dusk,
The landscaper, the vendor, those skeptical among
the masses who used to rake mud in the muck,
the husband & wife who never fucked;The housewife, the child, the mannered & mild
English professor that read Whitman in the park;
The Latina chiquita, the drunkard at Siamsa
will be charred

faceless corpses in a pile at dusk. So,

the Seder,
the Supper,
a forbidden picnic with a lover,
the president’s dinner with the man with the scales—
few somber survivors still tell these sad tales
as they wait around pyres to meet with the maker.One should be grateful for to be dead here.

*       *       *

6: Falling Out of Now

*       *       *

Then autumn becomes a violent season, panging
against black panes in rabid gusts, startling Dylan
from a dry sleep—a striking curiosity regarding
as to whether the hydrangeas had survived the wind
crossed itself across the midnight morning’s ceiling:
Sirius follows a dead master resurrected. Feedinginto this mad fancy, rising, remember how all seasons
in age of earth & unholy flesh alike become one again—
the flicker of a match, the flail of smoke across the mirror…—& there will be no cherries this year, nor lilies nor Washington
apples to pick with Mary & Sarah in the orchard, crying,
“Mama! Papa! Look—we are old enough to reach the bough!” & whenthe last snow melts & floods the gates of Westchester we’ll
brood on the sand-barred train-tracks like man & wife of men,
lacing hands like army boots, as if we never would again,
—n’so it will be. Every breath anymore, these days, gasping breath,
cuts the rope an English inch; & what cathedrals,
what sanctuaries of the mind have we kept, lest bothered with?—“When there’s light again I’ll still feel blind
as a slave chained to a screeching metaphor,
secretly supersonic—even though I see it, the mind,
the equations as elegant as debutantes in yellow shoes
glitting in giggling pirouettes about the floor”—
Another waft of smoke—the scent squirms beneath the door—…the crush & spark of an ash
against the glass in black as pitch as night…
—I’m going for a g.d. walk…—:—it’s an unopened window—
—a mental fire smoldering—
—it’s raining.

*       *       *

7: & Into What Will Be

*       *       *

Past the parked heaps of open hearses reeking real rotting dead remains—
the rapture, a little too real & rancid—past the gutters overflowing past
a single silent groan, creaking; the old dive, rummy with Lloyd
in the lacquered rustic booths way into the haziest, most wicked
hours of night—sincerity is a lost cause to the living—past my fire still
smoldering silent & smoky atop the hill; Old David,
our homeless patron saint—bless his soul,
his body—he stumbles, but we keep him well
for he remembers the days before these days, the days before the rise
            (& some before the fall)—the stinking steam profuses,
wafts in puffs that pour from the sewer hole—
a short cry beneath unmercied tones;
the enumeration of that old city still lingers
low above us, useless, & still the stillness
sits stiller still in the wet blanket of a heavy night—they say night carries all the answers, night
never wavers, yet never looks at what we’ve left
& feels not-alone—gives a thunderbolt sob
in a sympathetic meteorology,
or a lunar laugh in taunting melancholy,
saying “Fuck you America…Fuck you.”
What a dirty set of words—to match these dirty streets.
There were days when people carried courtesy, days
when neighbors new & old brought cookies for Christmas—
I don’t see neighbors here—only people waiting to die.One, dark & faceless, calls me “Doctor”, but the only thing I carry
is a pocket watch & fifty cents for the toll.So the briars bumble,
an old dried-up woody brick path,
wet—all roads lead to the aftermath—
—where else is there?
The Rodin still stands;       that gateway to hell—
—this one is more real.

*       *       *

8: Time Past & Time Present Prelude Time To Be

*       *       *

& well hell-o there Mr. General George Washington;
over which Delaware do you point tonight? Here we are again,
enlightened by another lonesome moon’s emblazoned light—
side-by-side we stand & you wear a halo; at your feet,
a sole (soul?) wilted rose, lonely as a drifter on a Mississippi
somewhere I’ve never seen—though, nor have you—me,I’m not much of a warrior, but I’d take a musket round for you—
not to the face though, for you’ll need good men like me
to lead the ranks—in life & in death            :
                                                                                    I’m sorry
I couldn’t save you, but now, I see in some small way
I did: You’re still here—will you ever fall? Was it at Walt
Whitman where we went all wrong? I don’t know.I can trip out on a catalogue forever,
& I think forever has begun,
& am I enlightened?Have you any plans tonight, Dear General? Oh? They’re set
in stone, you say? I understand. May I still listen through the night
with you for a silence that’ll never come? The sound of such silence? Like this:
The secrets of my craft could not be told to juveniles under your law:
your initiative rites were abolished
or commercialized.The deadliest man in a three-man boat
is the one that knows he’s giving direction:
Both are we men willing to sacrifice sacrament for success,
& yet you had to grow a set of false teeth, & someday I will too,
& will have no choice but to carve them myself from the cherry trees along the street,
all but dead & useless. What say you to that Mr. President? What say younow?—I walk on the old canal, remember the times I drank your ale
in the city taverns, bricks laid by Dutch masons—but is not a man-
enlightened so the world around? What is a country anyway? The same dusky streets—
& then here we are again, you & your halo, &
I salute you, & say, I’m tired dear General:
might I rest at your uneven, stony feet?Here, for you, an old poem, written in red ink on a yellow rose
twisted from lined legal tablet paper, my somehow still-breathing
body’s breath moist’rizing the cold wet brick that lines the floor—
I’ve nothing more. Goodnight dear General.
Goodnight moon.
Goodnight.

*       *       *

9: Coda

*       *       *

(The only time I truly sang was in a dream,
the kind of dream where bodies usually stay;
when I sang your song returned to me
& a liquid piano began to, trickling, play—
it gurgled over, then, turbulent, washed you ashore my ground
where held you I, your sleeping body cold,& we together drowned.)

*       *       *

10: Resonance & Outro

*       *       *

Then Dylan woke once thinking he crazy.
In sleep, his heart’d stopped beating,
though, his mind, still sprinting, knew
something unright. His breathing
changed a little—no substantially worthy
turning-blue of lips—so sleep ensued;& Dylan woke again thinking he sane.
“there is life outside this mixed-up dream”
& “maybe”. Dreams are always what they seem,
even if their symbols form a fabric draped
with tangible tantric seams:
This living stuff is not my afghan. Weave.The morning showed no signs of change
‘cept the first freckled frost spawning on the panes :
The pains of creation were more of a “perhaps”
than a certainty. Still, an echo remains, a relapse
back into it, a recollection he could drop :
At any moment Thought could stop.

*       *       *

11: Resolving Measure

*       *       *

Impositions on daylight, Dylan, back
from the bed & dark—the girl, she
looks like lilies; caresses? No       :
pain.       The thought, sleep, the
thought. Should he crack
right here?       Quite not.       Sohand here. Brain there, the ceiling
cracks & sounds like thunder, morning
shines & whispers in light phrases.       Stop.
My fingernail is broken, my teeth
are broken. O’, creature unscrewed from the top
to the feelingat the bottom of it, you have delayed
my ecstasy for today, your teeth
fixed in my schedule,
your nails in my breast,      & how incredible
to have heard the flesh seethe
& dance & leap in shadowy displays.

*       *       *

Part II

II.

12: In the Spirit of the Woodwinds (With a Soft, Rolling Cymbal)

*       *       *

Aristephenes Kelly, revered scholar Dylan once knew,
had a grey beard so white it almost looked blue:
His eyes always pointed Eastward to the wind,
his ears always pressed West listening,
his heart continued beating for long days
beyond “he died”, preaching in vain, & he was laidin a cave on the hanging of a sea
haunted subtly by the short “tré la lee, tré
la la” of its waves, in echo of Men’s ways,
ways quickly forgotten…ways wrought with unease…             :
What threw him o’er the edge tho’ were not the turtles
drifting in sparkled threads of man-o’-war scurtling‘crosst the top of an arcane & unreachable mediation
‘tween the torture of old music far-away, & old music
far-away-below, somehow so close—the same music;
more how he’d stare at the sky for days, awaiting occasion
to exact, extract the spectrum of Blue to Her truest specifications,
down to symbols for the eye, or the lute       :       a single thread—a nation.

*       *       *

13: Synesthetics & the Language of Poetry

*       *       *

What is even the form of poetry, the function of poetry,
scientized to be one & the same?
Form, function, the juncture of Mind
& matter, relative: Energy’s a sin unnamed,
& the lack of it. The imaging eye’s body finds
a new beginning of a line: the noun, verb, perceiveddraws emotion or action respectively. A European leaf
wallows in the fall, & I do go about observing
it, enjamb the motion with precision, like a coffin-maker,
place a seer at the end of my line, attend to meaning,
& then allow the leaf to fall as it was meant to not be seen.
Thinking is a past-time older than baseball, yet laterthan reading or writing (certainly discussion)…..
Americans prefer to join the symphony
with instruments unstrung, clad & moistened woodwinds
inserted into orifices: The point of singing—
the poet’s job, the poet’s only —is to put language (‘to bequeath
deafer ears a phrase, a melody, the harmony with which to speak’)
      to musing.

*       *       *

14: Paranoiac Analysis in Wind Chimes

*       *       *

& so wanting to employ Dali’s method
I open myself up
to all my worst fears—
losing my job, the end of
this tax term, apocalypse;I need an appointment with the dentist,
my car is a Honda,
I have a cell phone;
these are at the root
when I scratch myself in my sleep,
these my harlequin nightmares,
my pantalone dream-schemes.So it is for all the people I know,
at least those whose leftover dream-
pieces I care to bend over for to collect.
As for Dali however, in all his mythical metaphoric mania,
his most frightening is his Figure Standing at a Window,
&, more specifically, the girl, his sister, stuck standing, satisfied,
by the silent waves in that perfect window forever.The skiff on the water never makes it home.

*       *       *

15: Patch, Synth, & Comfort

*       *       *

Made me turn one down loosely yesterday, lips
wet & dazzling, radiant eyes, for another
gal, &, getting loosey goosey on this one, this
was the death of me, transcendentally
speaking of course, &, leading, let her
lick me till it was all casuallyspoken & licked & such. One foot
in both legs at the same time—
no other way t’do it.
Fine, my eye gunk has to go by morning;
like an old ship bobbing in a new sea, rime
is for mariners, & beacons the soaringalbatross—wise words for bird-Bones as relic
as the writing on the wall.
Maybe a good dance’ll make clumsy him fall
away like Autumn Leaves, or a record skip
remind us that life repeats itself when scratched.
What heart mends that isn’t cracked?

*       *       *

16: Motion to Conduct a New Movement

*       *       *

Most certainly I must be journalist,
& so wrote the gov’t for funding,
addrest a letter to The Riddler, to which he, personally,
prescribed in short reply: “Man money is free
if you ask the right guy!” & put me on the list…
I’ll have to start by doing what I can & be.I wrote a book. Placed some plants in pots.
Technology recorded my favorite shows.
Then, I forgot what I was studying.
Got a job. Stopped accoladingAuden in public for his citizenship; posed
for family photos again. All was as to be it ought,when the check came & I thought that no gift
could be bought, even if a better study could lift
the spirits of a thousand & one, one
for the extra effort, if it didn’t come
from a hand’s owned motions sifting through sands
of stories affecting every greasy monkey man.

*       *       *

17: Dylan the Half-Rest

*       *       *

So reporter Dylan tired & tried
to take the big picture
for the story, but what
story is worth twenty column-inches, & more
by a thousand words tied
to pulp & paid its cut?Reporter Dylan, wide awake, lied
to time his time in Fear & loathing enterprise,
jumping the train car,
looked rather metropolitan, too,
& made la gente think he’d been thru
their fuzzy parts before.Semantics. Tell me what you needs
to hear. Am I crazy? Maybe. Gonzo
at best. Worst case scenario,
you get your news.
The world turns. All the while he knew
no farmer shares his seed or reads.

*       *       *

18: Rhythm Figure 1

*       *       *

waiting for it
to come crashing
through like or as
a twenty maybe
a thirty footflood the television
is retro
fitted for disasters
with an off button

*       *       *

19: Accent & Fill

*       *       *

ah, pretty girls, see, Dylan grown
tired in his old age, & holding scales
‘s bound to make one weary ‘round the eyes,
but I need her. What more weight in lies
can I add? The more tales
I have to tell, the more blownpupils grow. Vessels thump
& thrust & grow & Dylan want to tell you
‘see you at home’ but can’t muster
the cajones to say so—true,
& one for the other side—my finger
is cold—zero to the bone & bloody stump—could do worse: a pair of ragged claws,
a tooth I couldn’t feel to hurt.
These things are blood to a body dying.
& when it’s so, & lips desperate blurt
‘come home,’       all morals, ethics & laws
will cease, & there be no tongues in lying.

*       *       *

20: Taps Interlude

*       *       *

Hey, “Bartender…another round,” I’m serious
& you’re pretty. Love is not prevalent
enough these days. Time
is theoretically endless—but not practically. The theory says
you’ve got to do with the body you’re lent;
& I’m bound to this ol’ skiff, stainless & prime-colored as it is, “Bartender, …another drink for me,”
& a moment in this life to stare at thee,
thine sparkled eyes, receive thy kindness, speak
archaically: Poetry matters. Love
matters. Someday, dreaming at sunset & by a tree,
you’ll turn & remind me of what I’ve done.If only people’d see
the sea I’d be dreaming of—“Bartender, …please, cut me off—
I’m waxing idealistically,
thinking life works, romance
explodes, doesn’t trickle with a river, a dance,
a word, a chance similarity,
& doesn’t die with a crest, a break; a tranquil trough.”

*       *       *

21: Timbre Switch

*       *       *

Slurred & grey as Zeus’ beard
in Rome, “Wish I had your shoes,”
one says, not seeing my bare & blistered feet,
nor having read the flaccid song of my lament, my woes
written silent as a scream unheard
through the terror of night—& sweet.Dew is unseen when it falls, but tastes
as honeysuckle to the tongue by dawn:
Ask & you shall receive, my friend.
Take this emptiness, my song—yawn.
Hold this pen.
Let me have cake& eat it too—work for me tonite,
play for ladies in strange winter dress.
Work the body to the elbow bones
& tenderize with sweet caress
nothing.       Walk your swollen feet home alone
to ease your brain below the stem & the street’s salty, stuttering lights.

*       *       *

22: Fluid Momentum

*       *       *

Then, a day,       a miracle, drinking       :       the bubbles clear the possibilities—
a dance, a dip, a forming of something meaningful,
‘cause no relationship (nor bubble) can form & rise
without bursting, perhaps a round or two to feel whole
again, together,       & when the lights go on, mine go out.
Beer-lip Nelly. A nip on the ear. Shout.I’d shout, “My Lord, you have forsaken me,”
but I try not to get hung up on symbolism
like He did:       When one prays to fall in love,       He rarely
asks for someone to love in Him what’s missing,
& never thinks ‘it’s not a determinism,
but an opportunity.’       “Who’s driving? You or me?”Leave the car here. My breath explodes
in the crisp winter night
‘neath the glassy streetlights
& is drunk with the ecstasy of the odes. Throw
your cigarette to the wind
to see which way it blows—
the pavement is patched with ice
& I will surely slip.

*       *       *

23: First Crescendo

*       *       *

But still, you & me—twisted more ways than one—
hello nine a.m.—love’s sound
a snore, that nod
acknowledging what’s hazy:
not sleep nor wake, nor that cozy in-between,
but what it’s not, & what’s at stake;
which way in the wind the shiny, scaled screen slats lean;what to hold or who, when it counts,
& if it cares, or me, or you—I’ve found
it’s not the latter all the fuss about,
but the happening. There’s no amount
of holding, no bank of kisses bound
to be counted, later, nor buried in the groundthat I won’t drag through the streets.
I’m rather attached to this cross I bear,
yet might be willing to roll a stone aside
for you, but to put my ear up to your sigh
& let my lips lick your inner air
letting your wonder where my body’d be.

*       *       *

24: With an Amorous Withdraw

*       *       *

In light, Dylan turns teacher—not quite—
preacher: certainly; & still journalist
through the heart but barely holding on,
teaches reductio ad absurdum,
quid pro quo, & cry into the night;
questions another item on Dylan’s list,checked off like life itself were meaningless,
as he might have—by accident—impliedtoday for today is his first try
at being not-existentialist:
life matters. A kiss
a responsibility, like
picking puffballs in autumn for a wish
or turning back on a drive to see the skyagain. See it again. G-d
is with me, & gave me this green
earth, these memories, the instances
when stillness makes the only sense.
I can’t even try, like a Colorado rain I’ve yet to see—but will—to stop
myself from pouring out with what to me it smoky dreams.

*       *       *

25: Twisted Legatos

*       *       *

So in love with you & tongue-forked & tied
about it, in bed Dylan slithers about your hand
while you sleep & tempt & laugh
because you hate it—we can’t fight
fate’s glossy, knotted staff,
unwind the braided strands
laced as our fingers beneath these grassy sheets;he wake before you always, wake to speak
but can’t for fear to rest your sleep,
so instead with you he silent play
& pray for faith in what we fear,
fear what seed our faith may sow, what grain
this fear might reap—oh dear,you’ve heard my thoughts’ caress,
have felt this touch & turned,
have lost the dream that made you purr,
which wasn’t about me,
& returned to sleep
wrapping me ‘round you as though you sleeping angels heard.

*       *       *

26: An Arpeggiated Arrangement of an Old Hymn

*       *       *

Allegories of Christ taught & told in parables &
a real old man nods off about the silver night in a stiff brown boat
not too far from his home of homes “still
I feel like this is my motherland”
but why don’t the white washed waves       bring him home
the same They never will      I know nothing of the sea never
have nor even thought to
look out my winter window
& let my soul escape just die
really       ‘cause I gots no fever
fors dreams of lions       but of the lightsway off in the horizon       off
where everyday people are
eating fish
& talking       talking calmly about the weather
setting the latticed table cloth as if
a tortured old sailor don’t sleep in his bed acrosst.

*       *       *

27: Prep Phrases

*       *       *

aboard a boat
about the sea
above the water
across the sea       …       after       …       againstthe lapping waves along
among around
as at before
…       behind       …       below       …       beneath       …beside besides
between beyond
but (except) by
concerning down during
(except) for from inside
into like near of off
on onto opposite out…outside       …       over       …       past       …       since       …through throughout till
to toward under underneath
until up upon
with       …       within       …       without.

* * *

28: A Waking Song (With Mid-Tone Brass)

*       *       *

A waking & a dreaming are different things,
like firetrucks, wheelbarrows, & queen anne’s lace,
the stinking rime of a modern land gone to waste
as well, & as for the waking & the dreaming, I turn to 29
& make good sat a thing “heavy on my heart”       :
back t’the other book, the experience is sobering—a similar sentiment. In that way, I hope to breach
the tradition, lead a normal life, rise up
of this bed, read the stack of books next to it, growing
stack of books I haven’t read. & then the seas—
another trope!       —it always comes back to it, the ringing
in my ears, the ocean! & then this love? Another distrustin the making. How can I believe anyone without
hacking them up to peer inside. Peer inside you
without you waking? Wake you without you seeing
me, & in the dim light of any morning
converse with my shadow
& not doubt?

*       *       *

29: Ode in the Post-Modern Tradition

*       *       *

I love a thing I think’s so fine for me
that sleeping, would I jar, I’d touch & grace;
that never in a thousand woven nights of silky sleep
would gasp & turn into the dimming pillowcase;I love a thing that sleeps to only dream
& so fine-threaded dreaming takes she & earns
that Loving newly loves to be loved & needs
to give what waking loving waking learnsbut fails to desire. Why? Two unpaid bills
are on the kitchen table; the white pan
from the burnt chicken is in the sink, still.
& as for this art & for this dreaming, all I canspeak of is the cold dark & the moonlit sheet,
& wonder how to make you look at me.

*       *       *

30: Nature in Harmonic Tones

*       *       *

It’s true, still journalist, but teacher
& never either in his mind, but
what better stuff for dumb people
than just to radiate?—yeah, pal,
I’m radioactive, too.Perhaps an artist, a whole theater,
an anteater, my spirit animal,
Dylan mutates every
thing he touches with
his claws:       My other animal.With no fear & only loathing
He breaks laws & hearts like his & carriesnothing.       About the bar as of on the wall a fly & creeping,
what is there to teaching
he can’t suck from the bottom
of a drink or swill of wine?
Nothing.
Dylan lives fine
destroying what needs him.

*       *       *

31: Electrically Instrumental, Instrumentally Electric

*       *       *

Teacher Dylan diddles with doo-dads
& technology throws him a curve in the class—
on go, silly teacher;       slum-less & thro’
his life it’s so
trying to last
till the ninth bell blows. It crows:Teacher Dylan, with his scientific rhyme
incorporates vision into the curriculum,
nevermind the mind-sponge,
or what old sames she’s dreaming of
when in her eyes the lesson’s done,
hand in hair & eyes on Time.Why bother? Books are out of sorts &
then she acts out Shakespeare—he’s taught
a girl how to tame a Petrucchio, the old-fashioned way—&
she acts out Hemingway—he’s taught
her how to improvise a cross, bear the weight
of Time in a palm wristed with a pink rubber band—yet can’t get the stylus on his palm pilot.
Bad Teacher, Dylan.

*       *       *

32: Truth is a Forgotten Song Remembered

*       *       *

“Come back to bed,” she said, all eyes
& lashes pointed like rays of dawn,
with “from this moment” on;
you will carry me
with you like the lies
I close my eyes to never see—Kiss.       Bliss.       Touch with tendrils tenderest; sex
a byproduct of the soothing rest,
an afterthought or formality,
&       —of course—       this writing business
nothing if I never read
between the lines you breatheout.       & Dylan did it, crawled right in,
watered the eyes, lost his tease,
& fell asleep.
                              Easter,       this bed’ll have been empty
from the start, & in the end
your scent ascribed in nectary poetry on our lonely sheets.

*       *       *

33: A Remembered Song Forgotten

*       *       *

But he like you ‘cause the way you rock his shores,
the way you grin at day, how you turn away
from it ponderous, sleeping;       how from your lobes
moons spindle shaped in the likeness of your kind;       adore
your breath pianissimo beneath me, the mellow notes;
your hips—debonair—that curve in cautious phrase, grazethe swaying faces blurred beneath the air,       the music of a room.
You lift my ground with an utterance, crumble foundations,
soothe yourself.       These are things worthy of a portrait,
but at best we will paint you leaning patient,
tracing, out the window, the patterns of a sea.       It’ll improve
you—to state the least, but as for the ship, our relation

is in question       :       us to it, that is. Not me to it, or you,
or me to you, but us to it. The ship, out the window
is important somehow if we’re ever to achieve a grounding
in this. Or that. Most, I love you, though, looking at, through
my eyes, not seeing what’s within, but me as the ocean, pounding
against a chest locked harder than packed snow.

*       *       *

34: Repeat Measure, Second Ending

*       *       *

Ahh, Dylan Kelly, lost in love again like catacombs,
always found three-combed, & teacher-like,
has ordered in & dreams flowery
dreams of nights out, desk empty
& away, & touched & known
from the outside, taste.       Bite.Innuendo-less, he makes a smiling mess,
lays back, craving amontillado,
lifting essays carved from brick,
& wets his palms to loneliness,
as, when the learning’s thrown
& snow falls, it tends to die & stick.Dylan Kelly, jester & just plain plain, jestfully,
still in three-piece, vested & with vested interest,
attracts no interest in love or lessons,
wisdom, or wise lessons about love, &, lonely,
calls for a cab for last call, where he writes on a napkin
& calls it a poem, listens,
& calls it a night long after all his life is a dead & hairy mess.

*       *       *

35: Bar Napkin Riff on Solitude & Gratitude

*       *       *

I painted you a picture,
but it didn’t have a frame;
I bought you a pet
but it didn’t have a name(so I killed it & stuffed it under the mattress—
sorry about the smell);I wrote you the sweetest love song,
but couldn’t think of a title;
even tried to sculpt your silhouette,
right down to your perfect smile.‘twas only then,
when art was worthless, damned & mute,
I saw the finest art in sleeping next to you(…& that smell…).

*       *       *

36: The Day the Music Died

*       *       *

I too have myself some Bones,
& hos’ she doin’ there, Toof
& Nail? To pull a laugh—
the news: Penny’s dead.
I wonder if she’ll feel alones
as here she always did.Jingle. Intoxicating report there.
“Yessum, sir. He done stole your girl,
He did.” What’s the price to Him?
“Nuffin.” In heaven He’ll have His
own World, my World, warped, feet curled,
& right to His repair:       Stare.No, Bones, can’t bring her back—
run around the casket myriad
& jingling for me, your head, your cap,
& refer to me as Lucentio. Pull the press
& fetch me the moveable type for my official address :
Journalist Dylan thro’ may have cracked.

*       *       *

Part III

III

37: Elegy Using Dylan Kelly’s Improvisational Method

*       *       *

:       Penny, I hope your last kiss,
      your face pressed against that glass
      was not what you thought it would be,
      & the real one, hours before, in the way
      I choose to remember you, was everything it could:
      kisses, when used sparingly, are that good.      Penny, I hope that kiss of glass,
      that first glimpse of it, made you high,
      & your first taste of afterlife
      was ecstasy. Did you know
      going into, the brake, the truck, did you know,
      close your eyes, & smile as it came, at last—      a relative term. It’s all relative, &
      where you are, where you’d been
      is irrelevant. There is only how I remember you:
      My teacher who,
      like all teachers, knew less than her student,
      & dreamt of kisses in her thoughts,
            thought of kisses in her dreams.

*       *       *

38: Return, No Shift

*       *       *

& too sided, but not two-faced, Dylan stumbled
the Morning, not having read the Tender Night,
& percolated no thing at all (‘No thing
but an arrayed mimesis strung in silly bells’)
& tells no one. The delay wasn’t the missing
as much as the strain of picking up the rightorder for repiecing, if there is one to be       :
He drove a car. Found some old hullabaloo
& got mixed up in it. Notes were outta line.
He might return to this year’s town, in time,
not thinking much, close a book too soon.
What he’d read’d be no good read, a good sceneor close. & alone, half-undrunken: “Darling,
me never want to regress through my own stages,
read from left to right again” “when”, & (‘if
& only’) “of course”, or “maybe”. Our pages
don’t grow fine with age, like rhyme motifs,
but crumble. Crumble. They fall apart, crumbling.

*       *       *

39: Sonata Withheld

*       *       *

“I’d picked you out a star one night—we saw
two, but I gave you only one & kept
the other for myself. You, unenthralled,
left directions to it on the darkened step, & yet
I wait there every night I can—the star—
the sky cloudy for me as it is; & yours?I always remember those days it poured & poured—
You remember them, the driving in my fog-frosted carfor hours, filling ourselves with talk & smoking,
a metaphor for the billows of the furious fire of young minds at love,
at the prow of a massive-masted ship—or skiff—undone
on the cloaked & raging waves of a cruel sea, then broken
not by wind or ice or lunar tide, but the shove
time gives waking, making weather for sun.”

*       *       *

40: Barely Breath to Blow

*       *       *

Dylan wish he could leave it all alone,
the phone turned off, the gas oven off too,
but the stove runs on electric, which is on.
The cable converter wouldn’t care anymore either
at which direction ‘the spectrum the crap was flung, who—
even The Morning Call’d stop or whatever.But then a silly rain might drop; or a kind sweep,
confusing, of shoulders shuffle by in a self-important shove;
or a glimmer of hope in a broken Latin grocery cart, the child’s name
Esperanza—which would also mean “hope”;       & love
your life to the end       —she always said—       need
people to need you       &       need to, fiery, love in all your days—She flickered like one. I still burn brightly too,
but it is raining, & without fire, without her,
I am a dying ember, wet with my own tears
& hopeless with fears
that hope for Hope needs more heat than what desire
Dylan, still in suit, can muster or hear from the ashes of his soup.

*       *       *

41: Refusal in Yeatsian Structure

*       *       *

I say, but a moment, loves from foreign countries,
two tongues’ ears tangled in,
then Dylan sleeps weeks reclining chairs,
never eats,
&, lightly sleeping, wriggles like a fly on a pin,
spitting out his butt-ends nowheres—The world has much Strife, eh
Dylan, & no wifey no more to say
“I love you” & “forever”?—Nor to nod, “never,”
nor shake her head, “yay”—No begging her not, to stay.—That the world never stays, I’ve learned.
It makes me sad. Is it me?
—I feel lost at sea, & still reclining,
watching it fall.
                              & with Agamemnon dead & all, the wall burns,
blankets my rest, the flame, Penelope,
drowning.

*       *       *

42: Newton’s Method of Grieving

*       *       *

It’s shown that thought-speed induces elation,
increases, likely, dopaminergic receptors
in Mind’s pleasure centers.       If this is, in fact, the case,
I’m high as a quill feather on a Jersey white heron
now       —& I have pains,
human pains—       & won’t come back out till a pretty birdcomes back to cry me awake,
my brain-fire burning through the night, the winter,
& I am alone—even within, no one is home.
I can’t come home if I come out a winner.
Fate is not easy to fake.When I am alone, there is good time to think:
People will die.
I will die.
So my sending off must be pitch-perfect,
right?       —Down to the spear, like a pen, through my left eye
& ear, between my last heartbeat & a blink.

*       *       *

43: Appeal in Fibonacci Meter

*       *       *

“Here, because I didn’t Know where else to look;
Here where publicly, water meets       Earth turns
To air, there being No word for the slash-
Bang of the fall through the rocks or the mist,
gusting & sparkling beneath the under-
Pass; but where is fire?       My pocket.       A litCigarette completes the cycle: now we
can talk serious       poetry, some god,
elements enjoined on these same street steps
—a tired oak pal our sidewalk altar:
three radiating       rows of bricks point to
the water & five to town. It occurs,intends, that three & Five make 8—       perfect—
A rapid—I real-ize (see) the meter
Sounds Fibonacci, looks like rain & falls
On a page the same place it smells:       Silence
then burns leaves of grass       on your gates, my affect’s
Libraries; strength a syllable:       letters       :

*       *       *

44: Invocation

*       *       *

“You, you who grew titan legs & arms & plucked with angelic delicacy
the heartstrings of a Brooklyn Bridge & jumped devotionless
into a sea of shame & moral debt, hardly forgotten; who
crafted art in the likeness of the stones you carried one by one,never wiping the sweat from your brow ‘till the work was done;
drank celestial brandy through a straw, turned on a phrase,
shot a dandy lion from Utah, then jumped ship to coastal France,
leaving only a woman’s sparkling hide & a black cricket
falling off ‘the spit spoked across the fire silhouetted against
the blackness of a true American night alone; hung a gown of crimsonsilk on a nail split into a cedar attic wall & lie naked on the bed,
assuming the position & role of the ultimate arcane ambiguity,
the sexuality of not-to-know; who purr & purr around my feet
& purr until a million bleeding ears buckle to their knees
& finally pray, then being the silence they were meant to offer;with your inscriptions bound in soluble glue,
written in vaguely ambrosial ink
a million times over yet scarcely read or breathed or consumed,
Please tell Dylan not to die, to love, what the hell to do.”

*       *       *

45: Soliloquy in Response

*       *       *

“Dear Penny: again I am not able to sleep—
three nights now & the terrible headaches.”—
The note left unsigned, the stairs perfectly unsteep
enough that his liquor-pickled body lay stayed:It didn’t fall       or slump       or slide, but rested, frantically
contemplating the extraordinary undulating infinity
of pain—or scheming to scrooge a buck for cheap booze,
liquid assets—his steamy soul pufting in spurts, not plumes,from the hole square       —round—       through his chest       —He
never was a man of great many words, many great words,
but there was something about his unwavering passion
that sang out in shrill cries like before waking from sleep,
still in dream, soaking in a swallow’s lament among dissimilar birds,
fallen, that I must nurture to sing to wake—& I choke him.

*       *       *

Part IV

IV

46: The Dissociation & Reintegration of Dylan Kelly

*       *       *

Dylan def don’t like the order in the institution,
the man in the slick white suit,       & woman
cotton-tail in sexy dress take his pen, for now at least. Soon,
or never—the statistics are nearly calculable—
if I only had a pen       but for my betterment—
I’ll have the writing back       & swear I’ll be more imaginablein my treatment of real subjects. However, the problem’s,
subjects are for royalty, & pupil-eyed Dylan’s
a citizen-supreme, organic conservative in his ideals,
yet liberal in what he ends up meaning, feels
nothing in regard to feeling       :       He writes what he hears,
& what he fears he keeps to himself, ‘tween his tweaking ears:that someday he’ll bring a return, a lightening
of the particular mood of these deathy times. The folks in Gaza’ll say then,
“Hey, rebuild Solomon’s Temple™ down the street,” & the Jews
will do exactly that, not to bring about the end of days, red
in color, deep in hue, messianic overall, but to bring about night, to sing,
to pray for their hunger       —it’s time to eat—       & mourn the loss of blue.

*       *       *

47: All About Old School Rhymes & Tattoos

*       *       *

& so being only “young” & not “old”, nor
“in between”, shoeless teacher Dylan makes good
with drags queens; doctors that are junkies;
knows & likes to know Everycat that ever stood
on that there scene—seeing “what” as order,
he moves, inspires, & questions everythingas tall as those cathedrals in all the gloried, glassy-colored halls
in the picture torture magazines you get in these types of hospitals,
psychiatric wings clipped & songless—Rilke-less       :
No bald eagle cigarettes?       :       Dylan’s more American than this.
Tobacco’s an industry that took raping to wrap syphilis
around entirely, & as for the frivolity of youth, I restmy black case—on the table—flick a Bic with my left hand,
& say, “this one’s for my homies.”       :       always a fool
gotta dig some centuries ‘fore he get dug, his cool
dream deferred by paperwork. Ya know? Nuances.
Irrelevant clauses. & they wrote “Fool” on his band
‘cause tongues were dying—lying—& tying together political clauses.

*       *       *

48: Confinement Measures

*       *       *

Dylan, we done dooed this to ah-selves,
put us here with no books on no shelves
to speak of, & why can’t we think
better thoughts & control?       —no—
positive & thinking & I know
anything I can eat or drink.Bad. Them Bones is fallin’ off,
with no meat & smokers’ cough
that rips like wind & sea & rough
tosst as an old man       —not by storm
but fish & adventure & determination to love
or erase from the moment born       —:A hurricane. That’s how I see it.
I am. & I exist & wish
we both could do the same
& bloodless on a thousand tracks stay sane,
but can’t       —you’re windy rants cause more strife,
Dylan, than a thousand rusty years of a Buddha’s life.

*       *       *

49: Titan Clarity in Strings & Waves

*       *       *

Only real if can be seen in words.       All that may come
from ideas are the things       from which ideas come. Rigor
is the conquest. Beauty the bounty; & Dylan       :       Captain
this here ship. He call her Inspiration. Conflagrations,
in waves, they prance on regularly like flapper chums
out for—our waltz—       :       Inspiration burned the day Dylan borethe weight of the world alone, a slab of firm marble sparkling
from the edges of the dark shadow he used to crop
“The Sun” from “The World”—from him. But a crack let in
light in intermittent cords &       this bothered imperfection
made him slip       :       it wasn’t his fault. No one thought “this rock”
or “that stone” compelling enough for thought at all. What king(‘Such passion for what glowing altars myriad
in silver, & black, & white on grass!Betwixt, an Atlas
of a man—my—arms could be tuff & strong!...’) expects
sailing to be an enterprise, supporting to be a role
in the picture of “things”, with a cracked mirror &
his one thumb in his mouth,       the other his empty eyehole?

*       *       *

50: An August Ode to Irony & Idiocy

*       *       *

King Ferdinand the Third, Lord of the All Unknown, sleeps
peacefully in his red chair (& it is a comfortable one,
as I’ve dreamt there myself) dreaming magnificent memories
of Martiniquian beaches & other things he seen,
while meanwhile it is almost time for his staff
to administer his daily leg pump, followed by his humble meal
of tuna, diet tea, & another nap.Soon he will sit at the kitchen table & proclaim
that he is short & fat—as all good rulers are—
& request his court tell me his fare       :his finest of educations, his wanderings diplomatic
before they happened—he, an ambassador for the meek
till he ended here: “seventy-four, short,
fat & mentally retarded.”The lonely squire in her ragged white weaves this yarn, keeping
in mind, “Ferdie has the thinking of a four year-old.”, chuckling
while King Ferdie’s eyes light up,
bouncing in living leaps about his velvet seat,
laughing, clapping, as if the Dumb were the best part of the story.

*       *       *

51: Reflecting on Colorful Music

*       *       *

this poet’s a real mirror, pickt up, dropt, & trampled       :       a syllable
per trinkling shard. Larger ones get bigger words—that’s
how Dylan’s poetry’s art—not more beats, but weights       :
subaudible vibrations, as a unit, make knowable
the whole reflection a small shard, or a large shard, like a bat,
creates. However, it’s the impression, perception spacedin clusters that don’t exactly break, but splinter
in reducible webs, he hates moving, fears deep—
& on inspection, reflecting on, piece by piece, an image’s
in each—       “Not me,” he thinks: Gas prices are lowered.
Rich-taxes are lowered. Mud’s covering the TV:
My resources for patching dull Dylan up are limited.When real things start plummeting from walls on crowded streets
I’ll engage in news again, but it’d be better for one nation
if it’s philosophers could pretend—for a decade or so—not
to know       :       let’s start from here—       once I knew a sad kid,
could paint a mead in speckle-flavored polka-dots,
& knew it, but didn’t want his palette shattered       :       me,

*       *       *

52: The Persistence of the Soul in a Mixed Spanish-Roman Mode

*       *       *

when Ángela-The-Roman-Coast sniffled & cried as Dylan chanced
to play the ward piano with his delicate, piano hands       :
& tho’ she never saw her life turn, a stone polished on a dancing floor,
it did, & she looked at it for a flicker;
thought herself from Spain—       & you, Dylan, were there,
feelin’ strange,       & left brain drooped with clamor       :t’weren’t the helping that put him on, but the “might”
of altruism as an electric lover’s comforter that made
her uncrying worth the playing for, playing Truth—
it of life in arpeggiated folds, how the brick moss outside relics cascades
once were, & might be again—but were. Then, the professed flight
of deliberate birds placking into a glass geology of proofis a sign, a picture of weather ahead—& above. Further,
away & the waterfall will cry you adrift.       Don’t cry
for me, waterfall. She is a Coast.       The half-songs
she sings are beacons constellating Most-Mind’s
moistest clear nights. In dearth, screams dangerous & long
do what they can to guide ships from harbor.

*       *       *

53: Scientific Resolution

*       *       *

A half-famous psychologist contended
—science
—solves problems
—don’t go “observing”       :
all along a happy hour Dylan stabbed his fork at, twisting
himself around the thought of cheap beer & wine & stinky cheese & on cue
            an old friend,
a better professor, came looking for him.—can’t swim, Dr. Barnaby—       “Water?…
…hmm…       —we’re talking metaphors here?”& from far away, Daisy Sun
smiled, seeing the two, engaged in conversation
with gaping motions of the hands & face, as once,
in a mental painting, on this beach sat Dali & Lorca.We debated our epiphenomenality,
looked each other in the eye,
like old days, & nearly died
watching she & Lopey Lance behind the plants,
then wondered why he does it,       & how Dylan couldn’t see to see
how to spark his own tonguey dance.

*       *       *

54: Interpretive Ode to Science in Art

*       *       *

an experiment       :       his machine?       :
:       a spinning disk, a sentence mounted
on two manifolds;       connected, a lenspiece
bifocal for viewing “a sentence”       :       a plate, a cut hole between
the lens & the disk       :       the person viewing sees
two words per second       :       a diaphragm, depending
on word-length, opens & closes—cloudedvision, thought.       —Our machine is not so precise.
One hole will do. The wheel spins, variable speed—
we’ll keep it slow—as the specialized machine counts
rotations, measures a person of average intelligence
the time it takes to comprehend the phrase flashing
over & again. Tweak the apparatus! Make loudnoises to fit our needs & measurements;
do really results any ever add up
if the subject can repeat?
this indicates comprehension
& completion of the test? is this a feat?
or is it whether he gets it?       & he does.

*       *       *

55: Tantric Tones & the Birth of Song

*       *       *

closed eyes & eyelid-dreamed, translucent,
the universe is a brain, an organism
with a whole love of universe we can see
& a spine & the pits of black holes we can’t;& that neonatal spine began to spin & build
on itself in layers & layers & strings of cells,
tissues & tendons daisy-chained till all of our wasted matter & energy
formed a baby universe that could breathe, & smell, & giggle—this is our universe—& I saw a brain in space again       :       floating, floating
through the vastness of all the glitter & sparkle,
every stimulation a flaring arch in pink & yellow,
blues across light years & decades—
we were in there somewhere too—& then it condensed, compacted, spiraled down
to its neural tube, its gummy wad of stem, then:
a crooked old man heaving his breath, dying,
smiling, holding a hand vanished in thin air &the blackness of space again, forward, staring
at the tube suspended
in forgiving, viscous embryonic fluid,
the dark matterthat nurtures our existence, when suddenly, it squirms
& bends & twists & blooms& somewhere sounds an angel’s trumpet,
&, in an instant, I am born. My heart
beats to the music en el ambiente, spread
out among all of my senses, todos mis sentidos…:

*       *       *

56: Exodus

*       *       *

Through the threshold of boyhood,
out of the cave of shadows,
devoid of mother’s tender breast,
lacking stepping stones & helping hands,
unable to seek answers from fellow man;unable to ask questions,
unable to see,
unable to hear the beckoning of the world,
feel the bite of the new year wind,
to sympathize with the macabre tears of Ester’s mourning skies;unable to believe in the majesty of the mountainside;
from word to sentence to the meaning of existence,
from poetry to life, I
a boy in love—with what I do not know—
float endlessly, happily through dead empty space.I have love, I do love,
but I do not make it—that is a man’s thing to do—
& I am just a boy,for I have no object of my passion,
have no passion for absence of desire,
am without desire for lack of understanding,
without understanding for lack of the propensity to create,
& unable to create because I am just a boy—
nothing more than a creation.The Earth turns, hues & blooms die & are reborn, gulls fly away,
away from death & decay,
as men deny the inevitable possibility of chance
of the fatal illness in growing old,
as men flock in migration, away,
away from their own demise,
& when the time is right,
when they tire of flight,
they fly home again—
when death is home & home is beautiful.I am dead, & I am beautiful, & like spring my birth
will flower the world with purples & tones & nectar aplenty.
I am the sun, the moon, the stars, the fawn
that writes its history in snowy hoofprints;the hunter in new, skin boots preying on her mercilessly in sport;
I am the leaves, the grass, Sunday morning family breakfast—
smells like gold       :       eggs over-easy, turkey bacon, fresh toast, juice—
A woman’s kiss, kisst with wisps of fragrant tulips;I am floating through dead space
waiting to be born.
& then I woke up.

*       *       *

57: Theme

*       *       *

it begins       :       with cracked-voice debauchery & a backpack full of books,
mostly unread, maybe a bottle of crème de menthe
in a front yard pine-covering & the kid’s neighborhood
at midnight in the snowy—no knowing what to expect; a dizzy
draw of that first mental cigarette, first of many; for the men
not with the child’s guided, easy heaveof the sledge against the wedge, the ease,
the obedience ‘the wood splitting, the splitting fission
of father & son, but the jarring memory later, as a woodsman, grown;the delicious trickle of delight alone, swills, pleased
in the bathroom with National Geographic, fourteen & aroused by socialism. No,
it begins deeper than that.
                                                Not before—deeper. & what is this life, these swellsbeing in the world? World? & on top of it, American? Whoa,
slow down boys, this is too much to handle       :       (Dylan,
closed-eyed & ageless grows old), but the poem of life, it
must be written. It must be heard & told & people want to listen,
but how to explode without losing one’s innocence?—What is a life in which one doesn’t want       to know?       :

*       *       *

58: Anthem

*       *       *

& now I have tasted the forbidden fruit of America, Turnpike Jim Thorpe Burger Kings,
the rest stop on PA 80, that vein of metropoly running through the forearm
of this purple majesty—unnoticed, unloved, railroad-tracked & smoking crack
with Rodrigo by the dumpster, just to try it;       —that wasn’t me—       & it’s so sad…—Matty Magz solemnly swearing out from behind plate glass & leaden doors
“you gotta be a real man”       &       “we’re not       18 anymore”
& “you gotta start treatin’ em right, bro,”
touching knuckles to the glass & hanging up the phone,
avoiding our eyes so as not to communicate the futility of either situation;Paul engaged in nothing & never married, an apartment 35 minutes out of
nowhere past, present or future, selling
pot for extra cash so Nikki can stay in school, selling
jewelry to pay the rent & getting
fired for not meeting the quota
on engagement rings;       James—sweet James—that licked Lucy & sitting up in the scalloped, breathing seats above the movie screen,
the music peering through the darkness, really believed
he sold his soul—to the devil, Steve McQueen—
when he dropped that hit, ya know, he never was the same;Clam Beach, California morning Keith from Santa Cruz       What’s it like? “Lotsa
pussy—real wet, too—” yelling & confused, then Gilden,
his son, two & in gold, dirty shirt, rotten tooth;
his wife hospitalized from methadone overdose,
their home a rebuilt Mazda truck & his days in the rodeos;all of me now burning night after night on rooftops with roman candles & silent guitars
crying for never loving, & never being loved in the first place,
for thought love lost & love thought like all the while, while meanwhile,
an infinity of silent shrieks shudder from unlit bedroom windows
in all directions, never heard or shown;masturbating in public restrooms, nursing wounds
on the thrill of bliss, having children out of wedlock
to leech the government of welfare checks,
appropriate feminist phrases: the cunt, vagina, the cunt—       :

*       *       *

59: Invocation #2: Dylan Kelly’s Resurrection

*       *       *

O’ Muse, who first gave me vision & have stripped it away,
who was with me through those wretched university nights
strung out on rapture & lust & sleep wrought with post-modern horror;
& the good times too:       that bar in Brooklyn under the El
with the gated, wooden colonnades & locks
like the hands of mighty Ajax—the Telemonian—where you slipped my mind through wormholes in the night,
back to Goethe’s Germany, & then, comatose with beer,
& babes, & the sweet breath of life, horizontal on Ethan’s couch
as you made love & spake to me in ancient Venezuelan tonguings,
licked me tightly into fabricated cosmic weavings, & left me
to wake with but a hangover & a half-smoked pomegranate hookah;who opened up the skies of that moonlit meadowland dreamscape
& let it rain, & echoed the wail of Zeus—unfed, unloved, & inebriate—
with the warm, gripping embrace of raindrops like little hurricanes,
& a saxophone shimmer that ripped through the crowd in waves
beating the hard &—
This is not the kingdom you left us; we have done this to ourselves:now, the ears of unborn children are singed & seething with music dominated by
      three unaugmented chords & a wail;
now even the dead are ungrateful & continue to age sibylline;
now the birds are nothing more than a handful of magpies sobbing in the late afternoon,
      because hangovers are eternal & the idealism of long-haired youth is a feathered
      bowstring strand of learned 4/4 time;
not a stone rolls these tepid days, just pebbles jolted & washed by an unexpected
      winter rain, eroded & smooth & slowly falling with & to the rotten tide from
      whence they came;
nor are there modern-day saints, nor sinners, nor believers in the mysticism of the thing,
      but simply lonely nine-to-five narcissisms in cars & buses, grand airplanes that
      mimic the starships only the imagination found in an endless string of 64th notes can
      surmise;
now big brother watches us with a sad, sordid, conjunctive eye & forgets how he
      used to hold us, rocking “…cry, cry baby…” in a wounded voice etched in nicotine
      & junk ecstasy, beautiful & tinkering from crown to toe to song in bells, & beads, &
      flowers weighted with the lead of bullets shot down by a grace note plucked by the hand
      of love;& the buffalo have sprung from the fields, from the meadows, from the receding
      glaciers of the once-unknown, untouched, unenvisioned America, retreating to the cities
      to soil the streets, raise yakety uproars in Louisida tenements, & unionize themselves,
      demanding reparations, healthcare, & a well-serving pension plan to tender their
      addictions;
but once I climbed a tree in Woodlawn cemetery, almost to the top, &, overlooking
      petty penny-pincher theft & cultural murder, rape, religious pederasty & gambling
      withdraw all about an august autumn cityscape nightmare, heard Eddie Ellington
      playing the keys of the gates of limbo with gaunt & calloused fingers from his grave
      beneath me & a heap of lilac & fallen oak leaves as red & yellow & ablaze as the fire that
      once leapt from his own dulcimer piano strokes, radiating & alive;
Miles was there too, & he heard me singing, & woke, & thinking my tune, draped
      in tie-dye as it was, song, let out a whole & muted note that lifted the curtain of
      afternoon-into-night swinging a band of stars twinkling like cigarettes cherry & dazzling
      as they swung about the grand dance floor of the constellations moved only by the       primum mobile & you,
&, of course, Charlie Parker, Cat, Bird, Mohammed of modernity with his mystic mantras of
      bebop Buddhism that call forth rhythmic shades of Mozart & progressions of tantric
      delight in infrared & ultraviolet keys too intense to be duplicated, too rare to be allowed
      to dissipate & stale in an air, or, worse, be refracted into a mathematics of empty desire
      & syncopation—blow, oh blow, sweet archangels of sweeping tenor strokes & alleyway melancholy in
      the rosy yawn of an Anywhere-American morning,
sing again that perfect musical shuffle endlessly rocking from the cradle
      of the mocking-bird’s throat;possess me to sing another & bring the Om & cool petticoat light
to a seething world of night, with no remorse
of Fifth avenue legal laments, or misgiving hallucinations
of freedom & democracy & engulfed in the terror
of our own whispered screams
as today’s sunlight-colored acid rain
furies across the velveteen countryside again.

*       *       *

60: Flood

*       *       *

& then I knew myself for ages & ages
as I all came flooding back,
the puddles lapping my face & the river the cityshore,
the music in all of my stages:
when I was blind Beethoven, prophesying ; Bach
as a maniacal youth, a clockwork orange of sorts—the cellos, concertos, staccato toccatas on the organ
& the noble dress on the floor gets sexier every century, the feel
of the music more openly seductive,
the warmth between the hands & hips,
the appeal to move closer & the denial
of temptation that comes from within,lest we not forget flashes & the buzz of red neon in the streets,
the twisting click of high-rise typewriter keys
transfiguring itself as thunder in the distance—
I was told not to write that in my pages—scenes
earlier too, as Browning—was I who saw the duke, pulled the curtain askance
to reveal that heavenly portrait—call me Pandolf—never chancedwhat it meant, where she went or how;
the sparkling sentiment, the satisfaction I, my body, received
as Bernini, piercing, himself St. Theresa with divine energy,
penetrating the stone, through; & who
chiseled that imperfect monument to Zeus
to have Poseidon knock it down?—then shot out of it, wet, drenched
in the moment of creation, the sensation
exhilarating & empty for being stripped away from—
the flavor of her earnest breast,
the drooping of the officious twilight in the west
broke his brittle, aged boughs as he were some half-flushed fool—these moments, these images, are arbitrary,
un-American, not mine—a cacophony—
every second in Time rushing through Mind,
running about the heavy air in multi-colored lines,when an old friend, a stone-faced General standing near, whispers softly
to turn my head & listen to the music of the atmosphere,
the familiar pianola playing from the corner bar,
which I approached, & was obliged
to check my silence at the door.

*       *       *

Part V

V

61: Dream Song from the Collective Conscious

*       *       *

“Where the bitches?”       generally speaking,
ol’ Henry to Dylan: we much the same, dig?
Don’t dare call him yo nigga’ tho’; Henry, he
mean man like No’ Korea (mo’ Russia in
his time) & look good too. Blushing’s
a sign of a good thing       :       (Naw, still not eat       :twice a day sufficient)—Grow up kid.
—Sir, but ne’er a fool I was       :       Intelligent,
for not here for th’bitches; Dylan came, comes
for love, so there’s none to be done—
that’s what we’re here to figure out, correct?
Henry,       scratching his intellect,       saidnothing, except Food & Beer,       Bread & Smoke
proceed in the library, where the elements
belong, understand?
                                          Dylan, hang your hat
right in front this man. Dylan,
                                                            don’t forget
manners—your manners, your stove-
pipe is full. Henry, you the man. Yo shit’s phat.

*       *       *

62: Folky Undertones

*       *       *

Like Billy Spencer’s, who cuts the heads off dolls, drives
a red, red truck scrapped by rusted steel, kills
the butts of deer. Dylan       seen him shoot an arrow
through a clear glass beer, a Belgian bottled ales.
The yarns he’d spin—you’d never know
he was crazy then. Half-Italian. Helped derivethe wicked things making Dylan much akin
to the those-before-him, like him. Dylan never
will get “iffyish” like some did.       Billy, on the other,
went ahead with it, selfishly departing Mind in dance       :
:       a graceful giggle with lips pursed, hands clasped,
eyes drifting together in appeal to lighting:Poor Billy: you had to bring me into this dramatic mess.
Winter is approaching, hoarding in season. The humor
drains chromatically from the leaves, the branches.
You are a packrat, & this       you will be known for.
“Now yes, you make a good point,       but American verses
must be tendered if to fit well in homes, theatres, & caskets       :

*       *       *

63: A Comparative Musicology of Whitman & Dickinson

*       *       *

A wispy Walt-zing worries me—
why want when one can wane;
why whisper when one can scream?
Waltzing was a wild winter, when;
while Wednesday, wholly Wednesday,
waits whimsically, wistfully to weighthe wallowing week now, more than ever—
now more than then. What wind-whipped
willows weep Whitmanesque-weavings wet
with a water’s weary white weather meant
wicked-heartedly, war with words, worse wits?
Who wishes it was he whom Emily wed? Then, herwaxy waltzing bothers me again. Dashes
don’t dance about the domineering dream,
dances don’t daunt debutantes in derriere
& Dylan don’t dabble in deft or dare
disturb the dimming distances of dawn’s decree,
drape delicate daisies on drops from modern lashes.

*       *       *

64: Celebration on the Metamorphosis of the Rag

*       *       *

& other masters too, they gathered to see just what
a dumb kid could do with a verse brought in a case
fastened with the gummy paste of childhood,
memories in the pants;       & what good but
in mending ones ways about a pub & face
a beer or two to replace beneath the hood?
Broca & Wernicke did most of the talking,
while Dylan’s bassy, leftist fingers did the walking.Economy’s out, energy’s out, even faith
is outta’ the bag, & while he plays that old rag
a’ sad & wondering when he might find
morning in his tin tip cup—drab,
a rusted flour mill he jams up inside
the broken piano pedal while he plays—
them peoples who think he can sooth
pay him & hear a new tune       :Like an oracle, to crawl beneath a piano
to homage me for this is an ode
sated by food & company
that good feeling comes naturally
to each of us, & the old things fall
dead & weightless like memories, & fall
dies soon too, before it is reborn. The crowd cheers
empty Dylan with Freud’s many fears.

*       *       *

65: Dylan Kelly’s Declaration of Independence

*       *       *

“Couplet rhymes but no rhyming couplet,
quatrains, blank verse, & the hero all combined,
unsavory in soups or stews, are a stanza
for a working pasture, unrefined, ancient
& decadent in business practices, once defined—
become proficient in detailing signs, mesas“narrower eyes might not have seen as ‘green’
or ‘fertile’
                              —at least natural metaphors
return to water when we wash our hands :“—Of them, this is the poetry, the motion, the gesture;
this is the sarcophagus, the casing of a new brand
ambigram: a gem:
                                          A diamond need not mean
an epoch, an eternity in the making, writing down.
It’s something you offer Athena as a consolation,
a metaphor, before turning around with dactyl, heavy breathing
to be The Man among Other Men—The Winning One—
then finally undress, naked with who you want, drinking in
the dying through a recollective sleep, an unspoken sound.”

*       *       *

66: American Canon Part I: Morning

*       *       *

& there it was, here it is anyway, my crown of sonnets, thorns of bliss—
beneath the ivy walkway on our college canvas,
we drank espresso milkshakes with the local rich folk—
I put begonias behind your ear—your times, America: young,
when music was the language of love & love spoke no tongue
in fear or grace. We burned through books like those groovy bridges—
            with their harpy spokes—I can still hear my angel’s trumpet’s tendrils, blossoms’ gentle
tooting on morning’s erogeny; Joel-Man-Of-Fire, properly proprietting
the Mobil on 146th & 3rd Ave., with his three college kids that (I remember well)
came home weekends, stocked the white-wood crates with daffodils
& carnations; oranges & pomegranate & cherries with smiles reeking
bison ancestry, desert jade; the jazz hip in midtown smolderingin the rain: you can still smell the sweat & tears of Charlie “Buddha” Parker—
even then—then the smoke of Cuban blunts still clings, clung to the walls, the carpet
reeks of Canadian whiskey, textbook-worthy treachery, Nirvana; Lorimer St.,
in all its cosmic psychedelity, the joint smoked of imagism burning cherried—
remember reading mono-toned poetry like we were Marx & Ginsberg?—the long oaks in Central Park; the bridges, once were Titans to us, embracing it,

*       *       *

67: American Canon Part II: Evening

*       *       *

the sound, the fury of a city’s throbbing muscle beating lub
dub with gargantuan arms of mental titanium—lub dub—
the oriental hookah lounge that always incensed of red Zen
on the corner of Strawberry Street & Jasmine,
across the jungle-gym where acorns used to fall like rain-
drops from towering trunks, maple messenger omatagonium danced balletfrom their perch in the heavens, descending upon us in embrace
of life like the lipsticked lips that clenched a cigarette all ‘the while—made
sacrifice to Bob Dylan—my namesake—took off our psychic raincoats in the aurora
of a sunshine hurricane,&, dancing, tried to enchant it thus into a mystic novella
scened in an imagined backyard dreamscape nightmare: our downfalls—
for this we brought back the begonias, pressed—the once-scarlet petalswent well with the azure cosmos of your eyes, I remember,
& do you remember that episode of “The Twilight Zone”
we watched at Ethan’s apartment in Queen’s, clutching each other
in the blacklight backlit ultra-violet dark
where the world ends & the only man left
breaks his glasses—

*       *       *

68: American Canon Part III: Night

*       *       *

—& can’t read? No, I never seen Le Albatross de Paris,
the sunflowers of Cordova, nor finished reading the canon
out loud with you while we lay—no, stay—in bed, once again
turning up the sheets & resettling the pillows each year flattening
beneath the weight of your head, yet still—& still I write, endure
American poetry, while the rain pit-patters like the warblazing ‘crosst the channel in a million bleeding sparks of kristalnacht, burning
crying—(‘lord, rain down on me!’)—against the outside of the window: Mi amor,
te quiero tu en la misma manera / que la luna le gustan las estrellas…—(Ce la vie,
Ce la vie), you’d say, Ce la…--I can’t even spell it,
but you always understood me, even though it was me
atop the stairs who first saw you before you saw me.You were starting down in fear. (C’est la vie), you’d said, leaving.
Me: Que serà, sera:       what will be will be my dear—what will be
will be…what am I saying?
                                    I need, sing with me one more time your body
of thought in a curved, acoustic-electric choir—(Nirvana unplugged?)—my lyre—
of Carl Solomon in Rockland, & pale Ramon in Key West;
about the birches in Vermont——Remember that time we danced with Degas
at the Metropolitan Museum—John Singer Sargent
reminded you of that song you liked. If we’d only shared
one more year of twelfth-month gulls on the ferry
ca-cawing politely to each other in a cloud of mid-flight
ca-cawing politely to each other under the canopy of night,Just as they always had—have. I can still hear them
even though, as of this dim
& dusky morning quiet-silence there
is nothing to be heard.So here it is for you, my poem, in red ink on a yellow rose, twisted
from lined legal tablet paper, my capricious youth, lifted,
tucked here beneath the floor;
the beating boards been sealed & shut,
Young Dylan is old & Young Dylan nevermore.

*       *       *

69: The Theatrical Rapture of Dylan Kelly

*       *       *

Yet, not done, Dylan ya gone & seen certain parts of South Korea;
Detroit, Tokyo, The City of Angels (all both
on layover & in film); the church in Philadelphia,
the church of truth;
& a few other American ones, looming
on the edge of his horizon       —for now       —& blooming
somewhere between all this
is a red daisy waiting for plucked to be its petals & picked,“She loves me, loves me not”       & I’ll kick
the snow outta laid out him if I gotta, break
my funny bone or chip my tooth.
I’ll have to wear my serious hat, move
back to Brooklyn (say What?).
                                                      Ghetto
& kicking his boots, Dylan works out
the kinks, in rails & wails, & his falsetto
ain’t so bad either. Then the world shouts“Love me, Dylan!” & Done-Dylan ain’t done
a thing. The world is before me, O’ before me now,
& I know I have grown because love
waits where I hate most to be—at home,
& I want to be Anyelsewhere, where I know
there is none:       —I know where, but never when
to stop the motion;       or is the world below,
& I supposed to be a cloud, picking up steam,
& the aroma of street corner tacos       & strange diner coffee?

*       *       *

70: Envoi, 2010

*       *       *

Then Dylan-like-Kant slams a beer in Swiss,
breaks the glass on the bar & asks for another.
Barring the bar, he never goes absolutely anywhere
but his chair, & the library for a newer older book.But his whip wit, his nip look & knack for hooks,
oh, could tear a man to rhetorical bits—& that’s what he wrote down in his journal
& that’s what makes it into history’s pages.
He likes pushing people’s existence to the margins
of them wanting to punch his categorical
imperative—right in the Spinoza:       his rages
are further defined on 27. Dylan-like-Kant lives ina phenomenal world, but like clockwork
seems to amaze no one till much later,
when he could care less no more about
the people at home. In his mind, Leder-
hosen & a slurred iambic tune in shout
were as real here, there, as they ever were.

*       *       *

Part VI

VI

71: Renaissance & Revelation

*       *       *

Suddenly, he wakes & briskly says to his friend, “I’m good
& done with this,” unable to know which life “this” is.
A few vacant words float by like blistering dust, & would
you wanna live your life in this?       (‘if not “this”,
there’d be wanting for, suffering.’)? &       “this” is ordered,
serendipitous precision, repeated, undeterredby accuracy, which implies second chances,
for they come about too often, so our guy need
assert no control on his character—characters
ne’er dart twice the same way to duck Time’s glances,
but always in the same manner, mannerisms, heed
to an ever-gaining angst reaching off his steed, then stirred
sudden by a wind, or a cricket, or a thing more arbitrary…there is never a “leaving,” as he waves goodbye however, or an “exodus”, but a trick,
an imagined exit, as all the room turns their heads to believe
D. knew it all the time (& he did a bit)—The arrival was real though: the entrance, the burning bush,
the groan; the joke the thunder told, the muffled microphone—the hush.

*       *       *

72: Jazz Shuffle & the Persistence of Beat Poetry

*       *       *

& he races home, his bags packed chock
con libros in languages he couldn’t read—
he hadn’t even read his own canon twice
on over as once he’d wished, thought he’d need:
& “diversity is more important now than ever”. Christ
is not the answer. Buddha is not the answer. Kerouacmight be, but is only part of a bigger picture—
a scene he painted in chapters of nothingness,
absurd, yes, but American youth is like this:
quantum, lifeless, an endless still-waiting-for-a-bus with less than
with what we came. Yet a gathering, a faultless fracture,
a collection of soul-shine. No? No connection?       :There’re no answers to this love, split or cut tongues to write it in—
No imagined script can symbolize one position,
or a poised & perfect stance, or a turning away perhaps, or a single word
forgotten beneath a bed, then remembered,
jerking the boy’s evolution to a spin
& resettling—       (ur Youth, Dylan).

*       *       *

73: Acapella & Pure

*       *       *

Kind of recharged & charged to chart the stars, I do, in Latinate words—
I try at least:       I do—       “The long poem paradox,
long-standing so, is still unresolved, unrevolved,
as of yet,” Dylan says, however—fractured, dissolved,
the cosmos of a million neurons into stars like birds
each & still deserve a good listening to.       Rocksneed ears as well. Daisies need ears as well.
Grapes have them, but who cares about fruit
these days?—the stars?       :       Them? They’re as abundant
& brilliant as ever & need not
get as much attention as truth, which is lacking       :       The truth
is that I like the idea of “stars above all”,not the stars themselves—but their movement
in the firmament is important; their gravity
overwhelming, yet predictable—in theory,
not necessarily in practice. More—no, less—nonetheless,
space must be filled with the sound of comets,
& I comment on it,       in & without love       & without a sonnet       :

*       *       *

74: Rock Garden Fantasy Ballad

*       *       *

We’ve got lifelong loves counted on every thumb—
I’m all them—one in the pocket
ringing Voodoo Chile at an inopportune time,
or wallet-folded, for safe-keeping, in lines
of exotic English, or Spanish so dumb
it matters on a single street corner in Manhattan
            & one misprinted locket            because it means something—No,
these are not mine       :       Memories
are a charged skull-cap used like a cup,
a fountain of eternity all used up,
to the last drop. But the taste remains
&,       with a trembling, sweaty drop, the fountain flows& in his apey pits, love grows in gaping gardens, grottoes
thorny of bush & lush       & fruity as ever       :
once you taste the fruit, unleavened crackers
mean seas in the way of sacrifice, while still
ponds embrace tranquility, & guardians of Love’s throes
stalk in the stems of green & slowly chew their kill.

* * *

75: Painting of a Pre-Established Harmony

*       *       *

(But then he got it. The Poem in the act of kindness
reads. Those that scheme more are important. Less
is more, too). There was a dreaming, an unrelenting
sleeping on a bed without a box, without a rose, flowers
meaning nothing these days, at its purest
when it was wholly sleeping, & not the concernfurrowed into an anxious waking put-off by eyes,
daylight—day. The waking, jarring waking, issued
no appeal, no means for rapport—if a painter, or president,
had your eyes when he dreamt, the skies
would clearer be—be clearer. The Poem represents
the kindness within it, within a sleep as sleep ensues,ensues upon an erosion of canyons quivering on lip;
lush, living savannahs on receptive eyelid; beneath the nose,
where lives, lies, the only part of Brain exposed
to air—to the quaking of an air. No one gives
when a man takes what he can for his portrait
& paints it kind, sincere, but distorted—

*       *       *

76: Time’s Universal Signature

* * **       *       *

Thus silence is the natural meter of a poetry—
what breaks distant waves & sea-conquered levees,
swirling pools—eddies crowned in foam;what naiad Speaking’s moist & singing tongue falsifies
with a flick & warm & hollow tone,
a lyre for softer-spoken deities?For it’s the idea of the thing by which we’re tantalized,
the idea of a trickle born as a thunder’s trumpet’s distant skyinside the sound eyes hear. A clearing shower, exalting
as it is, is no chorus. Nor are the cascading leaves
in Autumn angels falling downstream in tandem, un-
arranged, unaccompanied by strange, steady musing.
The ear, shaped in the likeness of a conch asleep,
was poetry’s only instrument before we set its motion.

*       *       *

77: Study of a Song, a Sleeping Woman

*       *       *

I’ll tell ya, I used to be a bench-sitter,
a real sonnet-writer, ya know; stare into the absence
of the antiquation of my own youth architextured
in usual rows of blood-colored brick & buttress colonnades
about my hometown square, really dared existence
sway me in its breeze without a care. Lectures
were longer in those days. “America,” I’d say,carelessly, “I love you in the same manner, way,
that the moon loves the stars.” Too bad I can say
I musta used that one on a 144,000 descending girls—
(I wished I could say I made as many pearls)—Then there was a someone, a watching of a woman sleep
in bed, as an artform, a rock with its own moss-comfort,
& I’m way too young to be talking like this, & “she
smelled wishy-washy, wispy, untrustable, like grass-breeze,”
& I turned & left the room.
                                                            It was then I came easy.
For if I’d turned again, walked back in, the metaphor,
without the missing, would have been much less clear
than had I skirted the room & watched her with me near.I might have seen her preapparent crows feet forming
about We, the parting or breaking of a death-sleep.
I might have seen the machinery of her patriot hypocrisy,
like Frederick Douglas performing an opera—how charming
how I might have seen my country as a little girl;
I might have seen my country as my only world.Have you not become a haggard knight in your gown of rusted nuclear mail?
My Aldonza, you’ve worried yourself blind slaying the even-scaled Communist dragon of
           conservative thought—your father-beaten dream-beaches breach bluewhales in your morning; Motherland cries, still tells no one:
Momma will say, “Our son is a new Don Quixote clad in shrouds soaked in poverty-stew
Our son is a tongueless Mexican, indirectly descendent of Fool; our new
son has no taste for our crazy beef, our son is a lazy twenty-two,on twenty-three!” Not you, though, no—you are no moaning Lisa,
           but a daughter of a darker-fruited seed,
           of beauty draped beyond the tangent creases of a dampened shutter speed……& as for the study of a song, a woman sleeping,
there might have been no song to sing
had I not come back to world to feed,
come back without her waking.

*       *       *

3

*       *       *