It hard to know
Why i was expelled
From the fundamentals of poetry.

Each day
Like a loyal monk
i played my flute
With the basket
Over my head.
As the lemmings
Passed
In quadrangles of co-eds.
For everything i must remember
Something must be forgotten.

Often the days
Of learning
Have attempted to remove
Both the marrow and my intuition
From my bones.

Learning is to suppress
Creativity within
Like a poor mouse
Dreams of cheese.

In the first graduation
A woman matriculated
From Adam’s rib.

Into my textbook
i stuffed the snowflakes
i have cut craftiness
With my artless intellect.


Learning
Is ego
And i am
Priest of nothingness.

Some times
The best koans
Make ice-cream cones.

like koans
halting in their tracks
your logical thought
processes like a train, black and long
when it runs in a padded room
small, silent, white

[two koans]

deader
than his animals
that could speak
to language?


[roof love]

alien
to me

were the ashtrays

failed boats
of teeth

for my angry
quiet
brother


[rattle]

forget, sorrow
your anniversary

in case
you’re not
alone


[firsthand]

are they gone

the cats of the doll-faced arsonist

how does one
earn
loneliness, or slip

from an overlong

baptism


[doll traffic]

it is not a darkness to call it the demon’s untouchable telephone

I’ve referred
to worse
and anyway
time is the gospel
of disappearance

in stories, my brother has a tail
and speaks
mailman

perhaps there’s not enough to do

the tree has horns

Days are dark, nights lay long,
Burning bridges keep us warm.
Wearily walking this road again
We bare the weight of the tinder,
The whispers and the flame.

What was once,
Shall never be the same.
The past floats as ash
Shadows cast on fallen rain.
While the willows weep in vain
The canopies confer in koans
The wind is passing wisdom,
Through leaves and seeds unsown.

Diaphanous dragons disgorge a deluge of diamonds
into the shadowed crevices of cumulus clouds.

Ruby-red sapphires overpopulate the glistening sky
like carbon-hardened locust: gorgeous messengers of the gods.

The Earth wears a crimson helmet, shielded from
the odious absence of ozone above the North and South poles.

Near Minneapolis, John Berryman's wizened body shatters
on the frozen riverbed below the Washington Avenue Bridge.

Angels weep to see him jump, as he waves a vaudevillian goodbye.
The sapphires blanch, then turn an angry, violent violet. Black holes ahead.

2.
Shakespeare and Mr. Bones **** on mortality's skimpy
skeleton of life. Will this broken body be resurrected?

Does it deserve such distinction? Better yet, does its daring,
drunken destroyer? Four hundred Dream Songs nod yes.

Berryman toddled ticklishly toward the last traces of transcendence.
Love & Fame broadcast how terribly his faith failed to trade

daily delirium tremens for the mysterium tremendum.
The God he prayed to demanded a syntax pure, plain.and perfect.

With jolts of jest, He jimmied paradoxes into koans. Berryman
howls for the sound of one diamond scratching the outline of his body on ice.

3.
He left a legacy broader than liquor, lechery and the love-struck ladies.
Lust seeded his fallow lacunae and lazily broke his wife's heart.

Scholarship scooted him to the squeamish, secluded top
of his Shakespearean class: Signal student turns trusted teacher.

Poetry cloned the Oklahoma clown in him. No successors,
no schools, no savvy peers, save Lowell. his fellow manic-depressive.

He dreamed songs of hilarity, humility, history, dehumanization.
Poetry proved serious business until it learned to laugh at itself.

Sapphires crackle under the weight of the creaking sun. They spin a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colors onto Berryman's obituary. Somehow, he has won:

An irreplaceable jewel of the sky.

the killers shoot lyrical
koans on the bar delicate,
I amble for a pint of
Dungarvan beer, whatever
the where that means.
There's a sunset here
and a sunrise there,
and lunchtime somewhere
in the middle as the mahogany beneath my elbows reminds
the Romans that I'm unsure
as to whether or not they made
it as far as Ireland.

General Tiberius,
are you awake?

The evidence reviewed, this  a half time later.
"a man can
make up his"
own mind, my, me mine
myme mine mymemine nine iterations,

expand the basic concepts of topological
space time, in the neighbourhood
south of all three bridges into Saigon, on the roof

Make it up, make it all up, and wait fifty years.
Whiteface.
And the mime in the street keeps the beat
silently reciting Kerouakoan streams.
'Tryna get to sunny Californy' -
Boom.

Canned Heat, sterno still, sip it,  get back
Beatles became something akin
to a window left open now
fifty years, since January 1969, Radioman
and Tom Green on the Panasonic
music from the other side… the joke
'Look Fred, that man by the road'
Some *** fiend got in print in 1968

Get back, Jack. And that

started the whole world crying,
from the commonwealth to common woe,

-- Interesting times upon us, oh yeh

A hook, in a song,
Forty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong
- ah, allusion, get back, prophecy
- right, fifty years ago today, soon
- Ringo says Forty Million Churchills, back then
or late, lately as the topo-logical-ournearity
gets back to optimum
later there, we were, on the roof
of that old fishnet factory
dangled there before, me,
the deal, if you want it, come and get it
better hurry cause it's goin fast,
ping
ricochet -
Highschool History, 1963,
Forty Million Frenchmen can't be wrong?

What does that mean? I asked
Miss Dinas, who was plump, and cheery,
and she lived with Miss Some-name
I forgot
to notice, due to, the clue
in the way Miss Dinas winked, that one time,
not
at me, when she said
Forty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong.
-- look away
Some squared away artist cries, stop the lies!
Gray-ace, go fish
Wordsworth,
happy soldier character- no, Fernando- a bull
ABBA , not winking - snorting
at me, when she said
feed your head,
autistic community, com-unionize AI
timeandspace
re-
alize the musical, a means of saying things,
silly, silent
hints of splendor in the grass,
and weeds, and black-eyed suzannes,
growing in the road,
Tobacco Road,
down at the end of town, where
skid row hits the river,
long and wide,

milk and Hohner on t'othaside
sharp hone mama
Sioux wee, Sioux e- baby, be my baba now,
Humbaba, guard
my forest
sein, mein, wine and rosy days being wise
in thine own eyes,

as we warned, eh/ wahrrmmmnned edu
mcate edumacation, the deal was…
I was to learn to
become a maker of papermoney clips
from plastic straws on a trus'line, about to rupture
and spill guts
on gumption swallowed whole.
-------------------
Koans and Cohen and all
-- If it had been my will
I'd a been so dead, so long ago, I'd be
as if I'd never been,
-- If it had been my will

True rest, needs a weary mind,
to weigh its worth,
hangdown yo' head, Tom Green, duely done
do tie yer Jimmie Lee Jackson
Bronc Rider Trophy Buckle to m'line
let it out
come think a mile with me, let's
see what come to mind.

--whistle break
-- heads abobbin, we rock on, Sisyphus
the first,
agreed we got the message in the medium
evolved by will worship alone,
rock on, roll on un
aided, no doubt by the spirit advisor
to old Abraham Lincoln's jot on the margin
"a man can
make up his"… hmmm, his own mind, hmmm

wouldjaremind me, what was I thinkin'
"a man can
make up his mind to be as happy as he is…"

Free to be. I think free to be alive, maybe,
Lincoln was athinkin'
as a we, the people agree we do have title right
to life, awe
ja,
and liberty, I suppose, we must define, to refine,
down to the gilt around the frame,
on the back side, wasted glitter, thin film of actual gold
well
I'll be, did you ever see the like, a
con-
jurer or a presti-digital simulacrum truckin' on and on
sayin' come on
sing old songs, ones we ever
learned again
today
what you never thought possible, just a minute
ago,
as we ponder the effect of a silly millimeter longer
rising in a ribbon
past lips of an apple green shade,

if you have 4/4 going on
it’s cardiac rhythm
you like 1&3, i like 2&4
but either one gets you on the train
you can layer anything on top
saxophone, guitar, synth
barking dogs, crashing cranes
airplanes, aggravation, nuclear ordinance
moans, groans, koans
your heart’s dancing