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A Caffeinated Revival of ArtThis business of poetry,damn it all anyway: fellowships, grants, competitions, masters degrees and silent nose-turnings, even the best lines deadened with syllogistic critical pedantries, a row of inititals incumbent on any accepted vision. More personally, all those unanswered self-addressed envelopes, the computerized rejection with a half page spared for a blank subscription form, treating all those whose hearts beat words like leprous mendicants expected to offer at least their souls for the privilege of a printed verse, nothing but scorn for a line that stumbles on the force of its own hard feeling. Let's burn these massive pourings until our credentials are properly approved. Damn is too light a word, say fuck it all, meaning no metaphor. Let the pages of the official poetry world turn brittle, glued together, unreadable, soaked with the drying yellow stains of my contemptuous, love-lorn jissom. All the same, I'd love to have espresso with Ferlinghetti in the Cafe Flore of my mind: all piss-elegant on an island between four-lane traffic, marble tables, striped parasols, and traffic so loud you can't hear yourself think. Everyone is there to see or be seen, except us. Give him a peppered beat beard, grey beret for all seasons, pen-thin cigarillos, watch him down tasse after demitasse of hyperactive mud in single gulps while he talks with practice over stalled engines and firing mufflers. Impatient with interruption, just rarely he turns from the street to meet my eye, dismissively pries apart my banal retorts in as few words as needed then resumes his torrential hash of language. Deconstructions of cubism, Miro, Pollock, Clemente, a riff on Picasso's shades of blue, smells of various seacoasts, Lorca's many murders, the grand annular eclipses of Whitman's hemmorhoids. Our ashtray spills over, smolders from inside, makes a little beach on the marble. Lifts his hand without stopping his talk, shields my match from the city's sea wind. He's got a lot to say about cocksuckers and art, buddhists, beats and sad girls in black with autographed copies and psychopathic temptations. He's a favorite with the pigeons, they're enthralled at his feet, his pockets filled with crumbs. One planet after another rises from our cups as he talks and talks. All the samer no word-beat missed, he can point a stained nail at a speeding Subaru, one wave in the motored sea, and turns my head to a fat woman at the wheel, hair in a red beehive as she rushes the yellow weeping streams of black mascara, while in the back seat, a little boy with his thumb in his mouth presses his face against the back glass to stare at us. |
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Issue #6, January, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.