if ted berrigan's
sonnet xv
   isn't a testimony to me
venturing to say:
keep the paragraph
custard away from us...
if ted berrigan isn't
an optometrist...
     then i'm vague,
blind... my eyes aren't
playing hands
  in a pub throwing darts...
because i have to say:
fiction is wholly linear........................................................
..­.................................................................­..........................
......................................­.......................................................
now i really appreciate what you're
doing... as every smart-*** does
laughing: thanks for the *****!
but... no.
          i've been prescribed
a celibacy where i yank and call
for Beelzebub!
    veal in a veil of sodden trademarks....
and once it was all about
making poetry jazz, but they
made it too obvious by reciting
their poems to jazz... only one
improv gets away... and lives
in this town...
and ol' teddy was in on it...
but i'd like to return to the tornado,
the crazy-eyes of reading poetry,
up
down
up
down
right
left
backwards
forwards
it's total freedom man...
a bee flies past
my neighbour's dog
walk in the garden looking
for the bark and the night...
i'm getting ******
and i'm thinking about
getting ****** with
the Jim Morrison tourists
who come to his grave
at père lachaise - funnily enough
i was there, once...
and once will do it for me:
i need the vampirism of
distortion, tackling imagination
with memory...
but seriously, why are all the competent
men of our age, lodging
thought into the brain?
that the brain somehow emulates
thinking...
there's also another gym opening,
turning brain (fat) into bicep (muscle)
by doing crosswords religiously
and all other mensa crap-a-*******-too
on the didgeridoo... qua quan quank...
for some reason i hear a didgeridoo
i only hear q... and testicles in a
wrench...
             but it really is optometry with
ted berrigan... in his sonnet vx...
up
down
up
down
              i.e. in joe brainard's college its white arrow
does not point to william carlos william.
   he is not in it, the hungry head doctor.
   what is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
of marilyn monroe, her white teeth white-
washed...
  so it has to either be optometry or gymnastics...
because i swear i just did a cartwheel there...
up
down
up
down
             and it's done with such force...
like a pigeon talking cuckoo...
    and then the hope that the dust does settle
down, and our modern narcissist
  steers away from looking into the darwinistic
mirror and incorporates other animalistic
traits into defining his sole possession...
     i'd like to see man imitating man,
rather than create this chasm of:
    like jacob unto god, so god unto jacob,
but given we're dealing with realism:
like man unto ant, so ant unto man...
           and you really can't say you'll turn
myopic reading poetry...
   painting, in words, not mere graffiti...
if like me: you get tired of colour
  and feel no need to experiment with
colour emphasis high on l.s.d.
   well: you're coming to the party of miserable
sods, with Dante at the fore.
      and if i really did mind the Geneva convention
on punctuation, i wouldn't full stop
and refresh with an
and...                               conjunctions don't
belong at the fore, nor at the back...
    but here's to heresy in the secular realm!
but seriously: why say thought resides in the brain?
and that we need more brain-power?
      brain-strain, ice-cream stashed as quickly
as a turkey might say girball in between that
cocky-glug-glug while being forcefed / stuffed...
  and would you believe it: it still won't
sit on a dusty mantle-piece... but glittering like
oil and gold... on something as intrinsic
         as an impermanent table of pilgrims.
male turkeys yes: where once there was a larynx
there now hangs a angry-red *******.
but you really can't say that poetry
can strain your eyes, you can't say
the writing is claustrophobic,
   that it really does strain the eyes in
paragraph litany...
       then it's at least that...
written like advert 1 and advert 2 by the side
of the road, two miles apart, on
giant billboards... albeit without
the fancy writing or the fancy colour...
but it's there alright.