Climbing Out Of The Pit
Many stunned, dark-gray sparrows
chirping, echoing in the night,
turned inside out and I couldn’t
find the seam. I could only hear the
sound of a static Coleman Hawkins & it
was the only thing that made any sense at all
I started to bop my
head up & down & up
& down &
I knew I
was
alive
boppin’
my
head
up & down & up &
down
“Inside Of A Dog It’s Too Dark To Read”
( a code poem)
I wanted to write & just
put the words
down any old way, without
thinking about them.. Remembering
what Henry Miller said: that if
he had it all to do over
again, he would just write
gibberish, goofy self consumed stuff,
following the dadaists &
their hat tricks: pulling cut out words
from a hat & sorting them into
some kind of abstract cohesive disorder.
I still do that when the mood
hits me. literally cutting words out of the newspaper,
magazines, dead books,
chopping them up, not worrying
about where the periods go,
or no periods, commas ... shit I don’t
know. Semi-colons? fuck semi-colons!
I figure personal in the moment
FREEDOM is what art, the best of it, IS.
Just to write without having to say anything
that matters or makes sense, no “engaged”
writing: liberation from lack of social statement.
I’ve lived my life like that: instinctively,
impulsively without plan or direction or
intention
“Outside of a good book, man’s best
friend is a dog. Inside a dog it’s too dark
to read”
-Groucho Marx
Evidence Of Possible Escape
The enslaved maid swept
dust from the
shadows,
where nothing had been (ever!) . But
the emptiness
had a residue (or was that an aura?),
that could only be seen
by the needle-sharp eyes
of hundreds of yammering idiots
once
each day
at precisely 8:38 a.m.,
as the sun hit the left corner of the oak bed
at the foot,
where a 65 year old wool blanket laid
piled like freedom
