What about high living limousine expense accounts in Moscow?

What about the late Rajneesh & poisoned gefilte fish in Oregon?

What’s hiding under Rajneeshis’ Orange skullcaps? Brains?

Then old L.A. Mountain Roshi even tap’d his young girls

and East Coast Roshi’s semen dribbled from Hawaii to the broom closets of the Catskills

Maezumi Roshi caused grief his senseis’ hearts wrung out with midnight sake & beer

Later he thanked them for A.A.

Veteran Zenmaster with motorcycle & community farm chorale felt up little boys

& a big guy too, tough as nails

Remember a strange Mongolian Russian fruitcake Lama in Polk Gulch Bay Area?

Vajracharya Trungpa! Dont mention the naked poet at the Halloween Party!

And the whispered transmission regent died of AIDS (disciple a straight guy sick they say)

Marxists were right, religion the people’s opium!

But who’re they to talk lookit Mao a Marxist his picture on every Chinese wall & Little Red Book

wherefore everyone stood up bedtime nites reciting his dread slogans?

They still had pictures of Stalin on truckcab windows in Gori 1985 a scandal!

And New Left carried psychedelic pictures of Mao, Che Guevara & Castro up and down Empire State’s stairways

A scandal of the sixties! And marvelous atheist Khmer Rouge read Marx Sartre & Erich Fromm,

how many’d they murder with religious good intentions?

What US President hasn’t sponsored war, Lumumba’s assassination, an H-bomb,

trillion dollar Savings & Loan mistakes? Scandals! taxpayers gotta subsi dize Banks!

Now we gotta digest Plutonium? how evacuate CIA?

Scandal hundreds homeless under Brooklyn Bridge freezing Xmas &

New Year’s Eve! Millions homeless in America!

Who’ll gotta pay for 500,000 U.S. boys & girls visiting Arabian Deserts?

Who’ll cough up billions for Iraq War to save a President’s face?

Twelve Billion dollars mickeymouse the year’s drug wars?

El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala we paid death squads for decades

Nobody does anything right! Gods, Popes, Mullahs, Communists, Poets, Financiers!

My own life, scandal! lazy bum! secondhand royal scarlet ties & Yves St. Laurent Salvation Army blazers

How many boys let me caress their thighs!

How many girls cursed my cold beard? I better commit suicide!

That wouldn’t work either, it’ll be a beatnik scandal

after Cassady’s railroad track death, Joan Burroughs’ bullet in head,

Orlovsky sane in Bellevue 1st Ave., Kerouac’s liver collapse & ruptured esophagus!

Trapped in living nightmare, I made a big mistake I got born,

The world came out of a black hole, whole universe

a scandal, illusion, everyone deluded, a cosmic elephant in the meditation planet,

George the IIIrd, Rasputin, Stalin, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Hitler, the 13th Dalai Lama’s Regent, Vice President Agnew,

Ronald Reagan delayed hostage release till the Elephant party’s Inauguration Day

George Bush peddled coke for the contras in streetcorner banks downtown Panama City!

Scandals in Buddhafields? big mistakes in Hemispheres, on moons, Black Holes everywhere!

Anyway, the national debt’ll approach 4 trillion any day say the homeless on Tompkins Square.

July 12, 1990

Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites Its Tail

          Oleta (Snake) River!

          Heron, Manatee, Osprey

Canopy of white red &

          black Mangroves

fighting for survival against

          exotics introduced

                    by Europeans

Swamp fern covers the ground

               by this Primordial Tidal

                         Zone,

Brown detritus under the

                    clear water

     feeds animals and trees in

                    high and low tides

          pulled by the moon,

     cycles of lunar

          reproduction following

                    waters flowing

          in and out the

          Intracoastal Waterway—

     Barracuda come

          in with the tides

               Heron we’ll see

Brazilian pepper

          & Malalluca

                    from Australia

brought in by Mr. Gifford

               first Doctor

          of Tropical Agriculture

Malalluca

     to dry out the swamps

          & make truck farms

          to feed the Northeast 1900—

                    Dade County

               tomatoes & cabbage today—

Then real estate won

     out, that saved the

          swamp

          water

          supply

This forest by Oleta River a tiny

     area untouched

          half a million

               years—

Interconnected to the

     coral reefs

     (as nutrient-rich protective

     soup for fish

               spawning)

          with a rubber tire, mucus—

               soaked in the ooze

     Red mangrove

          seedlings growing on inland skirts

               at water edge

          roots like spindly

               buttresses

First Indians Tequesta

     for 10–25,000 years—

          left behind shell

                    tools

     to make dugouts

     Mikasuki and Seminole

     were Creek Indians forced down

               from North Carolina

          by Sen. Jesse Helms

          then driven inland from