04 20 06

on the rez

04-20-06

for jack kerouac

(ONE)

  you remind me of america,
  america mixed with comic books,
 
  but poetry? no. 
  you do not remind me
  of poetry.

  you should scrap your poetry,
  you can't move you are
like
  ravaged tee pee after cavalry
     has prepared you for
  the reservation
  the bad land
  of metaphors
     mostly tumble weeds
     or their timber twines
     finally
           splinters of
     hundred year homes
     by thousand year floods

     billions of tons of ash & mud
     down mountainsides & through
     expansive valleys
like
     you ask
  why
     do folks talk in terms of
     ridiculous numbers?

  then,
     you reiterate
     to make the deft or daft
     the mind for poetry?,
  as if poetry
     were only to
     bridge gaps

  where's the bridge gap jack?
  oops some one blew it up...

  you then
     quickly turn to talk of
     scouring the pig's belly with
     surgically sharpened similes
     like manson sized ice-cream
     scalpel scoops
like
    x
       xx 
  or        xxx
                   waffle cones

(TWO)

  you are waffle cones, dipped in caramel,
  with nuts mixed with nuts who promise to
  launch them off
like
  little tasty treats
  over the river or ocean toward enemies
  giggling under their breath
like
  ... one of poetry's true amazements
  ... one of poetry's destroyers.

  the high schoolers ask the teacher
  if they have to read the whole thing .
  the cliff notes may be overkill even.

  jack, you should have just wrote poems. 
like
  the best minds, but even then, the
  best minds, retarded, like special bits
  of poop & pee & sprinkling bity pleas,
  because, nowadays
  you are as boring to them as noriega
  or how the french ended up in canada.

  they like their own waffle cones, lots of talk
  & giggling under breathe or over
  harry potter, especially the harry
  potter movies, & internet porn.

  so, they'll read your excerpts & then
  they'll report to their teachers;
  i am here, that guy is there,
  let's not wave, there is no bridge,
like you are the tribes & infantry of
  solitary forlorn mystics begging
  the authors of poems to operate as
  if required to belch forth alluvial
  fragments of articles of things similar to
     your cut dress
     or my inverted spine
  as if they'll all line up
                        eventually
  in palaces, in lands with gold, &
  honey up to your gulp gulp gulp?...

       ney.
         
          they see through the
             smoke screen

  it's
  merely a fort
  buttressed by big guns
  & armoured by pipe bombs & billiard
  ball grenades, arrows & scalps.

  you are the calvary the infantry
  you are the red man

  both on the barren reservation range
  ravaging the memories of the love
  of your life, raping her viciously
  & murdering her again & again

(THREE)

  your costumes are forgotten
  in dust

in the dryest of new mexico
in the dryest of south dakota

  or you go on the road,
  selling slot machines
  of circumstance, or genocide,
  genocide on the cheap, for pennies
  from your colorado cubbyhole your
  14th street fort

like

  the same few mystics & poets
  who followed you there all yelling,
  the banal ginsbergian yawl,
  in cultish unison
like;
    come here you!;...
    peer into my garden level window.  please...!,...

    wait,  hmmm,   ...
    nevermind,

    we're on the fourth floor,
    with jack,
       so,
           fuck
       you,

    rat-a-tat-tat

~luc u! 6