Holy, black typewriter, frenzied,
spits out strangers’ love letters, desperate, the ink band half dried
(but ultimately returns to its grave of dust).
Withered books, yellow pages carelessly leafed through, devoured
(pay no heed to the traffic - walk and read),
falling from one pain into the next;
such are beginning and middle of these days...
And benzedrine fever dreams are fleeting,
as elusive as great insane private revelations
mentioning Ginsberg and Hendrix by name
- a swirling fata morgana of Buddha, Dharma, cult,
and a thousand angelic punks, punk angels, safety-pin-winged,
dreams about Neal and I (not I) being cops -
revealed to my hands in a crazy stupor, darkening and
illuminating the whole café, unaware-
and I know that Marlon knows a jeweler, knows
his hands -
how does that fit in here?
These days waste by, racing, crash-trickling like waterfalls,
like the Niagara Falls that made Joe cry -
and now I watch him cry,
shamelessly, inconsolable in the face of beauty,
crying like he’s never seen water,
as he hands me another case - Morpho menelaus -
dead, killed, (killed on Denver roads), escaping freedom
in the giant hands of a not-so-average Joe (secret hero of this poem),
his eyes glued on life, and full of tears
and his dad didn’t want a daughter neither, wanted no children at all-
And down in Mexico (where he is now, or was last)
the plywood violin plays the open-highway-blues
for a not-so-sober Jack who loves and hates and loses.
Somewhere amid the British-American chaos: a pair of twins
suffered at the hands of their mother,
suddenly forgotten on the road...
Speaking of “mother”: Soon I’ll miss a wedding, and
- come to think of it - so will Jack, won’t he,
the other one,
with his red lips and olive green canvas, with his
made-in-vietnam imitation of
father Dunkirk’s blood, fallen soldier, 1916 Jesus didn’t rise -
How to lose my mind positively, flush out the memories?
Swimming at midnight: the cold lake homely in my bones
all washed over by iodine-orange water.
Mark hums sweet country tunes, wheat between his lips, "hey la, my boyfriend's back" -
and the sun never sets
and the coffee is always cold
and all the pages are black.
And Springsteen lies on the nightstand, his spine turned to me,
sharing his makeshift bed with Kerouac and butterflies, and
a cruel storm of stories that sends my head spinning
makes it so that - unable to form in the hurricane -
poems cower in the back of my throat
like predators waiting to jump on their prey, and -
any minute now, I beg them, any moment-
but they shake their Rottweiler heads and bare their crocodile teeth,
taunting me, saying
that the wordy intelligence of others dumbs me down,
burns me out, charcoals my brain with the soot,
leaves me without originality; no
mind for my own words, no
regard for the verses crying to happen, only
the need to write, write, write,
stupidly, like a dog is forced by instinct,
the insatiable need to spill, to transform, to twist, distort, to prophesy, to-
Some journal entry reads: healthy coping. Think:
Growth is inevitable.
God is inevitable!
Pain, and fury, and love, are inevitable! Luck -
To take this earth and make it yours,
this oyster,
and realize that it’s also everyone else’s;
(boys, no, kings of summer)
inevitably working together to create beauty,
only one glass case away from bewitching your living room,
from taking its seat right beneath the busy hand of God
and hold up the mirror:
this beauty was you all along. And me. And Him,
and everyone else.
This Father wanted a Son, wanted a daughter, even,
and,
suddenly,
this close to the face and hand and chest of God,
the old fear of 23 turns into excitement
with all our eyes, full of tears, glued on life -
still,
even now -
This is, essentially, a summary about my July in 2020.
