Am I God after all, made the universe, we dreamed it up together
or got tumbled out of the Chute onto the Planet, looking for progenitors?
I know I’m not God, are you? Don’t be silly.
God? God? Everybody’s God? Don’t be silly.
February 25, 1994
Ah War
Ah War bigness addiction
Alchemized thru meta-industrial
Labor-Intensive permanent tree
Crop protein energy system
recycling Urban Wastes
in Meditative Egoless non
Theistic Space
Lisner Auditorium
Monday, March 21, 1994, 8:00 P.M.
Excrement
Everybody excretes different loads
To think of it—
Marilyn Monroe’s pretty buttocks,
Eleanor Roosevelt’s bloomers dropt
Rudolf Valentino on the seat, taut
muscles relaxing
Presidents looking down the bowl
to see their state of health
Our White House rosy-cheeked dieter,
One last, gaunt sourpuss
striped pants ankle’d
in the Water Chamber
Name it? byproduct of
vegetables, steak, sausages, rice
reduced to a brown loaf in the watery tureen,
splatter of dark mud on highway
side cornfields
studded with peanuts & grape seeds—
Who doesn’t attend to her business
No matter nobility, Hollywood starshine, media
Blitz-heroics, everyone at
table follows watercloset
regulation & relief
An empty feeling going back to banquet,
returned to bed, sitting for Breakfast,
a pile of dirt unloaded from gut level
mid-belly, down thru the butthole
relaxed & released from the ton
of old earth, poured back
on Earth
It never appears in public
’cept cartoons, filthy canards,
political commix left & right
The Eminent Cardinal his robes pushed aside,
Empress of Japan her 60 pound kimono,
layered silks pushed aside,
The noble German Statesman giving his heart ease
The pretty student boy in Heidelberg
between chemic processor abstractions,
Keypunch operators in vast newsrooms
Editors their wives and children
drop feces of various colors
iron supplement black
to pale green-white sausage
delicacies the same
in tiny bathroom
distant suburbs,
even dogs on green front lawns
produce their simulacra of
human garbage
we all drop
Myself the poet aging on the stool
Polyhymnia the Muse herself, lowered to this throne—
what a relief!
March 24, 1994
New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
O homeless hand on many a street
Accept this change from me
A friendly smile or word is sweet
As fearless charity
Woe workingman who hears the cry
And cannot spare a dime
Nor look into a homeless eye
Afraid to give the time
So rich or poor no gold to talk
A smile on your face
The homeless ones where you may walk
Receive amazing grace
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
April 2, 1994
Composed at the request of Ed Sanders for his production of The New Amaz
ing Grace, performed November 20, 1994, at the Poetry Project in St. Mark’s
Church in-the-Bouwerie.
City Lights City
On Via Ferlinghetti & Kerouac Alley young heroes muse melancholy 2025 A.D.
Musicians brood & pace Bob Kaufman Street and practice future jazz on Rexroth place
Spiritual novelists sit rapt in contemplation under the street sign at Saroyan Place before they cross to Aram Alley
Loves’ eyes gaze sparkling on Bay waters from McClure Plaza at the foot of Market
Old Market itself as Robert Duncan Boulevard teems with theosophic shops & Hermetic Department Stores
& crossing Duncan Blvd.: First DiPrima Second Henry Miller Third Corso Street
Fourth Jeffers Street & Fifth on John Wieners Street the Greyhound Terminal stands
surrounded by Bookstore Galleries, Publishers Rows, and Artists lofts