photos and
artwork by Jimmy Warner Design
I’m Living Thru Me
You didn’t need me as a young punk,
your poetry only a wordless liturgy;
you needed ten yo-yos a week,
some backstage lover to slap you
glory-struck and full of infinite solo.
Your real poet, a reed, spoke like a wand
thru chinks in the lacquered plating of a saxophone,
the almost silvery inner metal of a soul to be,
a hero, painting barefoot, muscles feeling color
and new thought coursing thru cherry faculties.
He wrote impure stanzas named for every
sub-cult hearsay, rummaging and trial,
listening without fear to my unfolding ode,
the human details lining up for symbolized life
later to come, God-like for the taking.
Like the bruised future, made up by its refugees,
you rush out of the black, out of whiteness,
gray-loving and loved by not defining love,
with no opinions to form or hopes to pin
on ancient accidents where freak weirdness
often shows up willing to work,
as the cardboard sign cleverly reads,
"for solitude, dude,"
The painter, reedman, writer turned odd-ball
wants to proclaim his "winning the lost",
the few that he could find, and how he
showed them new tricks and new worth
in the war between a slick new heaven
and a rugged rawhide of ever-aging earth.
Come in, there’s reserved seating for you
near the window, further back, your choice,
you don’t have to choose till you get there.
You’ll like it here, in the New Age temple,
the one disguised as the whole world.
Ignore the force beams that tug at you.
II
I’m living thru me, now, ushering myself in
by the grace of an uncertainty that
even *Mrs. Browning found so
beautiful,
wandering in and out of its own
shifting gray shoreline of music,
beach rock notes as tentative as wet footprints
left by its bio-hazard lovers on the loose.
The sea that was, is not the sea,
and winepress poetry is not wine.
It’s the wizening you really want,
the wrinkles found in both, all ages
condensed into a semi-precious drop
let dry on the skin, feeling it prickle.
Can you taste what you want?
The free market zone can turn
your poems into streams of unsafe data,
though one learns to slurp in fresh volcanoes.
Feel the chat-room heat of creative interruptions
pouring out of the world.
Why don’t you listen? Your eyes are listening.
Perception is raw stuff coming in
when only your eyes are listening.
Much of this window pane logic
is ammonia sharp and squeegee clear to me,
now, that I have a seat inside,
a glimpse or two held closer than life,
a light still blue against my skin.
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Sea-Side Walk
