What Happens with the Flickers before... and after:
Prelude: A lost book?
What can we say to the huge night
Or heavenly labials in a world of gutturals?
Before and after :
How can we survive the sacrament of praise
And the eye of the young alligator?
Here is an official context for the folia of genius:
In the feelings toward near genius
Among leaves gathered and prepared
Since there can be no official genii
Even among the gathered pages
And the notes prepared for the fiction itself.
I.
I hear the baby cry
In the audience
Between the syllables
Magnified from the stage:
The auditorium is the stage.
I hear ‘they are not shooting
At you...
Let me show you my wounds.’
The room escapes: Escape
The real and the unreal.
Koret Auditorium July 1, 2012
II.
Couthe in Sondres Londes
The misery before war
The rattle of the city
The village without grains
The time of trouble
Every day, every day, between mother
And daughter and afternoon
Couthe among the poor more heartily
Than inconvenient banquets and spilt wine
So many lands, from Paris to the outskirts of Menton
Almonds on the ground on the way to the mission
Every day chickens in the rafters
I said everything bad all day.
III.
And the book with the updated version
And me with the preacher in the back of my thoughts
Behind the counter at the bank
... With the too many letters for the agency form
Explanation which she understood...time
To look thoroughly from the balustrades
Of things I do not know
Like the child in the balcony
Visiting
What is at best feigned
In his experience
From the safety of shadows
Among what he has come through:
Accidentally!
Pronouncing German with a Netherlander accent
The French and Provencal of the 12th and 13teenth century
To ogle at the woiks and words
Cf. Chaucer
Sans Spencer and sans Shakespeare:
From a deserted room in the 32st century
Of a muddled old man
In his late sixties:
Avoid the confluence of poets
Internationals
On the west cloud of Amerika
Before the revolution to come.
IV.
Hot, hot tub
To ease my back
And Chaucer studies
To ease my thoughts
A day after recourse to Stevens
At the opening of the International Poetry Festival
Sometimes I even get the word right
Despite the years of futzing around
In the shadows
Diminished
In San Francisco
Which I shall barely attend
Naked as I am
Despite expectations
From my intimates
And those passing through my faux-images.
The former ...
From across the borders seas
Linguistic boundaries
I am more comfortable with the heritage
Of a poet: remember you dropt the class
The day before the end of the semester
Because of that forced feminist reading
Of the professore?
Today Chaucer and the French Tradition
Yesterday Stevens’ The Collected Poems
Say it twice
The bells are ringing
And we are too close to the church:
Style is not poetry,
I remember him saying
And hot, hot water
Is a prelude to vertigo.
Muscatine.... A belated rationalization
For my not writing in a single, recognizable ‘voice’
Let it go: preposterous.
V.
We watched it in its original and in re-runs for years;
She and I had a run
From sometime late summer 1969 I think
Through December 22, 1993.
The last original ....
So, that guy I saw yesterday
At the opening remembered me
From Boston the second or third time around,
Maybe ...just before I met her in 1969.
I told her I would not break his karma
By saying I did not remember him,
...
Because he deserved the continuity of those memories.
She asked me for biography.
I gave her snippets of arrests and degrees...
Didn’t mention too much about insanity,
Except I had some of my drugs on me
...this startled her,
Drugs maybe meaning
Recreational drugs to her.
She wanted me to do a memoirs:
I told her I was content
To filter all that through my poetry
...sublimations and Adrian Rich.
I must not trade my own riches
For her poverties
E’en though
Her riches
(Which I feed on)
Are such abundance.
While he still constructs texts
That are not accessible to me
For more than a half-dozen words,
Having no sense
Of a consecutive order to them.
VI.
Let that will-o-the-wisp go by as what it is:
I did
Not say
What is necessary is
To keep a friend safer
For a month.
Get a hug and a cup of tea.
Printer still shuts itself off instead of scanning
VII.
I invited her out to lunch...
Asked her to call me in half hour to an hour
To let me know her answer
Once she knows how she feels.
My ancient empty street
Someone Else’s Song
The cure for being used
Is the sound of your favorite song
By someone else
A someone who is happy
To sing someone else’s song.
The cure for being down
Just because you’re down
Is to hear someone singing that song
So listen
Someone else will sing your song
The cure for ghosts and demons
Is to play that song again
While you hear it in your ears
While you’re turning round your head
To hear the song you sing
When you need a cure for something
You can sing that song again
For yourself.
She says she weeps for the world
She weeps everyday
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