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SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM

by d.a.levy PART ZERO - Celebration With Rada Drums only ten blocks away buildings burned - perhaps burning now the august night broken by sniper fire police men bleeding in the streets a sniper surrenders (perhaps out of ammunition) Gun Jammed? someone sed he was framed in a doorway like a picture - his hands in the air when they shot him - only ten blocks away from my quiet apartment with its green ceramic buddhas & science fiction books unread skin magazines to be cut up for collages only ten blocks away from my total helplessness from my boredom enforced by the state they are looting stores trying to get televisions so they can watch the riots on the 11 pm news the national guard jeeps patrol the streets again the army-green trucks with the giant white star on the side moving in the summer lightning i cd tell you partly why it happened but you wouldnt believe me like in Milwaukee during a reading just after i said "this is a paranoid poem - written when i was experimenting with paranoid states of consciousness, but im not there anymore" & a young girl sat writing "shows paranoid symptoms" probably for her psychology class not hearing me at all i cld try to tell you about the hopeless despair ingrained in ghetto walls & police brutality or police stupidity or police reality is more than just words to define situation by students looking for a cause. the situations exist & continue quietly in the dark while the protest goes on in daylight - both unheard. Really the police try to protect the banks - and everything else is secondary during the riots i watched the news & didnt pick sides for a change i just sat wondering about all the living room revolutionaries safe in the suburbs who cheered everytime someone was shot or a building went up in smoke ten blocks away it was real thousands of tourists arrived PART ONE - THE HISTORY "east Cleveland has more history than Cleveland" she sed as if to pump that additional piece of information into my de-generating energy centers like a gas station attendant i couldnt get it across to anyone how tired i was just writing poems for tomorrow or writing poems for myself a form of suicide I DONT CARE ABOUT EAST CLEVELAND'S HISTORY! since it all began in cleveland anyway & thats where the shit belongs east cleveland with its ancient city manager city commisioners is not like cleveland, where the mayor & councilmen suck money from the federal govt & cosa nostra & syndicates it doesnt really matter what you call them as long as you know who to pay & who to take from & never let the little people know whats happening if theres any problems just blame it on the communists or the john birchers or the black militants or the illiterate hippies depending on who yr talking to at the time "east cleveland doesnt have any problems" and in the near future if they ever organize the fine arts council, even the poets will be kept in line like they are in cleveland its so easy to convince poets what poetry is and what it isnt & everyone knows sleeping with the muse is only for young poets after you've been kept impotent by style & form & words like "art" after being published by the RIGHT publishers and having all the right answers after youve earned the right to call yrself a poet yr dead & lying on yr back drinking ceremonial wine, while the muse, who is always a young girl with old eyes into the universe suddenly remembers necrophilia is an experience shes had before & shes not interrested in straddling corpses anymore You wonder why your kids are wearing flowers in their hair & laughing in the park its the bitch herself eating spanish fly candy whispering in their ears because, even if they cant fully understand what shes saying - they know how to listen they know how to read Look magazine between the lines & they still believe east clevelands history is NOW at this moment suspended in the 4th dimensional cinerama movie we pretend is living NOW when i am wondering if the Indians traveling along the Lake Trail had as much trouble getting a good piece of ass as i do (excuse me, my internal dakini you know 1 love you spiritually write my poems for you, but 1 like to keep my fingers in something wet to remind me where i am i dont want to end up like Kenneth Patchen - hiding in California - an exile Pound & Artaud locked up in the past - Poe a lush a paranoid lush! lady you have to be realistic sending all yr poets to the looney bin aint helping the profession very much your blue hair in the wind & yr eyes full of diamonds your trembling neon thighs spread in my mind while i sat in a quiet apartment on Savannah Ave waiting for my teenage wife-mistress to come home from work after the night shift waitress on a death ship restaurant a greek Yorikke with its $1.09 specials of shishkabob, lambstew, barbequed chicken porterhouse steak, veal cutlet, spaghetti etc all tasting the same i sat at home while downstairs, the hillbilly dog barked into the blackness everytime a piece of newspaper rubbish or gumwrapper shuttled across the sidewalk i sat wondering if she was getting pulled into some quiet driveway & getting raped while i dreamed of love & peace & dreamed of strange women in erotic costumes knocking on the door whispering with wet lips & flaming roses between their thighs instead every young girl old girl i ever met wanted me to be her brother a friend, "fuck that shit" i'd scream at the shadows maybe my teenage wife-mistress is getting raped on the way home from work & ive got to go make a movie & i'd leave the empty apartment head for the restaurant down Savannah & Alleghenny & Northfield to Euclid Ave for a cup of coffee very disappointed to find my old lady still there working late nothing exciting ever happens except when the neighbors moved every 2 or 3 months without paying the rent & the landlord would ask us about them we never got to know our neighbors very well we decided to move after some young buck followed my old teenage wife-mistress home one night (it could have been me but the wife still being Christian at that time i didnt want anyone to get hurt trying to rape her no more walking to meet her in the sun or in the snow or the dark nights when the street lights turned everything funny shades and the sparks from apartment incinerators leapt into the polluted air like fireworks no more back porch with a window for the siamese to climb out at night & wander the streets terrified that some big tom might kick the shit out of him so many boring nights quiet halloween parties on Strathmore smoking the benevolent herb & drinking scotch experimenting with giant vats full of home made soup we made soup you wouldnt beleive just soup nothing to shaft but the 17 yr old soon to be my wife for mutual survival & then the year & a half on Savannah finishing off the last of the peyote gave us both belly-aches & no pictures in our heads popping acid or morning glory seeds until the law sed "fuck yr god in the mouth" & sealed the door to the universe with a cross & the law the downtown cleveland narks & the city councilmen a bunch of transvestites dancing in the streets shouting and giggling "We are God, We are God" FUCK THEM I'm a levy & a scorpion & a poet i dont need drugs i just wanted to be like everyone else & everyone i knew was taking drugs everyone i knew was reading the P.D.R. & developing psychosomatic illnesses just to get pills any pills what else was there? television? jacking off to the commercials the old lady nibbling yr fly during the food commercials RUN & TAKE A PISS BEFORE THE MOVIE STARTS AGAIN the television nibbling at yr fly until the old lady returns the television - just another drug good old sub-urban life anyways, i'm glad they passed the laws too many young kids trying to turn me on young girls want to come to the house want to bring grass - write letters wanting to be my friends celebrity hunters who want to visit the local poetry ashram - fuck that shit i feel like an underground movie that was burned by Savonarola im still looking for a horny white coven queen who can come in her mind and let me come with her last time i took acid i wanted to get liberated immediately almost dropped dead decided i didn't want to get liberated that way too clinical sat down & watched the walls melt & turn into flowing swaying throbbing yantras designs all visual stuff bored the piss out of me everyone else wanted to ball as much as i did except they were all afraid so we just watched the pictures jump out of the walls im tired of being the instigator three days later returned to normal vision 20/30 or 20/60 variable depending on how bored i am working out the problems of the universe thinking weird thoughts writing paranoid poems about the police nothing to do except change the kitty litter, empty the garbage nothing to do except go to Adeles bar the last religious frontier & watch it be destroyed by the University property-mongers daytime in east cleveland the sun breaking thru the mullberry leaves thru the window of our new apartment on Wymore the sun softly thundering across our new oriental carpets from the Salvation army on 55th Street Everyone Sez, "write a poem about east cleveland" yah man, wouldn't that be cute! PART TWO - THE WELL Most of my thirst was quenched by answers i brought myself still, i suppose i never could have found them without that spot of light on Euclid Ave. you could not get a good cup of coffee at The Well no matter how hard you tried or how long you waited i wasted a full three years thru mediocre tea bags dishwater coffee & hot chocolate that stuck to the roof of yr mouth just like climbing a mountain a Christian mountain the Well was there to be conquered except no one could find out exactly what was happening there or what its purpose was - First the establishment tried to close The Well because of the Beatniks - later to be called Hippies & an ordinance was passed saying you couldnt wear sandals in east cleveland Second it was the spades, as if those young chicks were all going to drop their pants at the sight of brown skin - man, nobody was going to get into those teenybops - and them teenybops werent letting anyone in - and rape is for kids so nothing was happening so Third it was the motorcycle outlaws causing all the trouble - except it never saw the trouble, i never saw a goddamn pubic hair, i never had a cup of decent coffee, but 1 did a lot of waiting & heard a lot of guitars crying in pain - i dont know why they wanted the Well closed but I'm glad they did it i may have spent my whole life waiting for something to happen it died an ordinary death when the Press Bar decided to EXPAND & the nebulous coffeehouse never did turn into a nova it just got replaced by a couple of pool tables & now no one worrys whos getting laid by who just so long as those long haired kids dont sing anymore of pete seegers old songs or songs of Joan Baez or smoke parsley or take fake amphetamine made out of flour nextdoor UNDERGROUND MOVIES happening on Sat.Night - goddamn i feel like I'm stuck in the middle of a hick town - this is supposed to be one of the countries biggest cities! UNDERGROUND MOVIES! Grade D movies on witchcraft & only three known covens in the county most of the ohio covens supposed to be in Cinncinnati TAKE THE MOVIES THERE experimental college movies acid-flicks to non-acid audiences Still - a unique experience sometimes a good movie allen ginsbergs smiling face continually appearing Is that hip? Kuchar Brothers, Peter Bergman labyrinths no movies by Clevelanders who stayed in Cleveland, no movies about the Cleveland Underground . . . the continental theatre where i pass out copies of the Buddhist Oracle to paranoid right-wingers who are convinced it is a commy publication no one understands what the paper is all about i dont understand what its all about lot of nice looking women tho i never laid any of them every Sat. night waiting looking into eyes trying to find someone i lost More than 5,000 years ago was it Assryia? Babylon? Atlantis? the Lady with blue hair & eyes full of stars running across the sand - in my mind while every Sat. night i was passing out papers. Running back to the Well the narcotics dept is watching they are convinced there is underground drug traffic operated by the french syndicate going on between the coffeehouse & the theatre A Communist plot - Camels packing opium & hash & owsleys unlimited underneath the bar - in little girls snatches Interpol aint going to talk they'll blame in on the Mafia if anyone gets caught i keep looking for that drug traffic for my own purposes while 1 was waiting for a decent cup of coffee as a cover up - it never happened! just that puke faced suburban living William Burroughs - rescue me! forget that! Michele Ray - Yael Dayan - rescue me! I'm sitting in the shadows of the Well old memories left in my head from the days when it was born & i took the Rapid from W. 25th & Lorain to Superior or Windermere & walked in the slush of late autumn to wait in the coffeehouse shadows watching it grow - inhale & exhale listening to Miles Davis music inside my head Now i sit at home & fly with the Jefferson Airplanes earphones taped to my head - listening to Judy Collins Country Joe & the Fish - Buddhist Chants - Pink Floyd - Richard Farina's ghost - classical spanish music my skull cracking wide open & the last of my brains & collected words floating up to the ceiling it was much simpler when i walked in the summer to the North Branch Library & couldnt find books on Tantracism, Dadaism, Buddhism, Egypt, contemporary poetry - there was a lot of Americana Propaganda i was very disappointed - 1 really wanted to study - instead i sat away the summers trying to become as soft as the trees trying to understand where they got their faith in life growing - growing patiently leaping toward the sun There was a time when everyone wanted to be The leader & get something going - but then it was decided, it was more christian to serve rather than lead so the place was full of lieutenants waiting for a captain to present a plan of action he never appeared or maybe we missed him thats a cleveland neurosis i dont understand what its doing in this changing suburb maybe its contagious maybe the spades moving up Hayden Ave will bring a leader with them the john birchers visited The Well one night waving their curious form of patriotism - the 16 yr old kids laughed them out - the young trots also talking at The Well, the 16 yr olds either went to sleep or got nervous & left to wander the streets THE WELL a real liberal coffeehouse died a quiet death - june first 1968 Recklessly In Naive Peace Lenore Kandel, J.D. Kuch, save me! PART THREE - i guess it was her sister Dream one: ground zero 2 - defined as traveling thru conscious space - when you reach an extremely dense area of consciousness - the mind (a mobile zero) visualizes the conscious mass as light patterns or as light .... Dream Two: a thought is matter - what form of energy is used to create a Thought? Thinking is the organ- izing of thoughts or thought patterns - thing in not energy. Thinking uses a form of energy. What form of energy is used to create the original thoughts? Try to become THAT! Dream Three: chaos of pictures living the giant painless movie waiting for wisdom that is supposed to arrive with age - some senile motherfucker told me that - i didnt believe him for a moment but decided to wait until i could find some way to not wait without becoming an instant nova hello astronaut no im not a firefly no im not a flying saucer in the distance I'm a self contained unit of consciousness waiting to be reborn - can you hear me? can you hear me? At The East Cleveland Congregational Church Dance doing a benefit for the murdered coffeehouse on 115th - & the outlaws showing up with most of the money at the door & getting very bored - God's Children - The Gringos - Slave Makers etc a liberal church - i was very bored - watching for those eyes --- & found her sister "the empty / handed magi breaking the snow / for words" t.l.kryss to d------ you dance (barely moving) in the basement of the church someone wearing colors picks you up & carrys you around in his arms & for a moment lines of flesh are exposed for (a poets small) eternity my eyes captured & photographed your moving figure (that picture - still moving hangs in the sacred galleries of my mind) (that picture of you moving like a tantric angel - secured in the cathedral of my skull) i ask myself if it is only with a poets eye & for reasons of aesthetics that i single you out from the shadows later you stand at my side like a holy spirit radiating light & we exchange words we do not want - pretend a game we dont like and ask each other "What do i want?" "What do i want?" lady, what do you want? when you are offered even the unknown boundaries of the skull you dance away & pretend you did not hear you disappear like a swallow on the wind - dress in pale blue and fade into the sky as if you never existed it almost seems as if you refuse to share the things you ask for "the young woman who went to play with the dogteeth of summer" george seferis no one even noticed you slipped into the anemic church even more dangerous than the angel of death - i looked for you wrote magical poems that didnt work found you for a few moments outside the unitarian church weeks later sat in the car with you bottle of beer held between your thighs wanting our spirits to touch our fingers & our lips to melt together on 82nd street stoned on amphetamine i let you slip away again what did you want? your blond hair for a moment in adeles the heavy golden light around you lady you were beautiful & i didnt know why! a month later you crept into my head while i was sleeping i tried to throw you out & you just sed it was a nice place to be" funny no one ever noticed before my first non-paranoid telepath experience - left me hysterical for weeks. . . . im still hysterical dont have the answers i just write these prose? poems? & tell myself like i told her when i was in Milwaukee & our minds touched again (NO SPACE NO DISTANCE) maybe it will be better for the next generation lady your son can read the poems & find out how we were murdered for 5,000 years let him know there was no place for us except moving or becoming invisible you can watch the ones who didnt move fast enough they are dying & they are called Poets people used to be afraid of poets now they dont listen anymore so everything is all right (?) lady - you were beautiful the night you sat in the theatre very tired & disappeared when 1 wanted you so badly & didnt know why everyone sez "write a poem about east cleveland" east cleveland i want to leave you i am tired of being one of the local bearded noveltys i am tried of being lost in your boredom i wont even let the television nibble at my fly anymore no more TV Trances you sons of bitches trying to sell the light hologram miracles "its a cheaper brand of light it doesnt last as long as the real thing, but the people will never know the difference" 4 1/2% INTEREST! CLEVELAND TRUST with its unseen altar of skulls you people who laughed watching us die & pretending it was because we were young . . . . east cleveland EXPAND your internal environment let in the sun i am too young to commit suicide for yr amusement you open the doors to let me get lost in yr bureaucratic maze you freeze my mind with yr peasant intuition your intellectual superstitions in the background i sense clannish emasculated masonic mafia rites worse than chicken sacrificing voodoo cults worse than all the ego-inflated occult masters of white & black MAGIC your misdirected psychopathic concepts of brotherhood worse than all the sick murders of children thruout history east Cleveland, 1 am not even talking to you - or about you perhaps thru you "one hand washes the other" thats what a white racist sed after giving a friend of mine a ride every time i washed hands with the county i walked away feeling a little dirtier CHILDRENS SONG for Patrick O'Malley in east Cleveland the police say hello to me in Cleveland they ask for my I.D. on the west side, even if the police have known me for years, they still ask for my I.D. as if there were two of me both with the same face but one without his fucking draft card the aliens are stealing our forms, i guess i think the east cleveland police are nice guys but i still cant ask them for directions, not certain where im going . . . . PART FOUR - Forest Hills Park The mailman tells me he was a writer but he decided he liked to eat so much for how America keeps her writers in line if i have any courage next week i'll kill myself every week i tell myself that & find something new to write about or find a new way to say what I sed last week the last medieval frontier gothic ohio a catholic whorehouse - guardians of the light - BULLSHIT! Nicene copyright - Bullshit! secret ouspenskian groups hidden in the suburbs - scientology Level 9 Cayce Atlantians - BULLSHIT everyone using the groups to escape their response-ability for Reality Now poetry - the last round with mental dysentery before confronting the Reality of Oneself in relation to the reality of the universe poetry - the greatest bullshit of all! Reality Is, Mister Donut - Luxemburg Motel Tujaques Bar - Scotts Hardware Glass & mirror Co. (My friend still in jail - i dont know how to get him out - thats called "poets power" - thats how America keeps her poets in line) Sinclair, Atlantic, Sunoco Gas Stations more gas stations than restaurants a friendly town if you are just passing thru HELLO JUDGE ADAMS yes, $20,000 is a fair fine for a jaywalking ticket, sorry, i was thinking about fucking & i didnt see the light you can have my drivers license too i cant afford to park in this city i remember old wine & pot & methedrine parties up the Superior Ave Hill stoned - staring at Forest Hills Towers billions of dollars for apartments they let one negro move in & they think they are integrated - reading john updike & look magazine & ladies home journal three blocks away - people on welfare you stand up on top of the Apartment Building & pretend you can see the city then you dont have to see, the young colored kids in rags or the high school greasers robbing stores so they can dress decently FOREST HILLS PARK you smoke pot & look at the stars until the police throw you out so you dont get beat up by somebody who doesnt smoke pot the good citizens are all watching TV for years & years while jungian mass subconscious traditions & sub-cultures are transmitted telepathically all the young heads running around the park stoned convinced no one has ever done it hefore its all been done before i know people who take dope and watch TV - no morals! mixing mass media & dope fuck that shit i cant get out of ohio Ingrid Swanberg, Aileen Goodson, HELP! FOREST HILLS PARK full of stoned poets who couldnt write their hideous visions of medieval Ohio, folksingers strangling on their unheard protest songs, joining hands in the darkness of the mind to forget the poverty & lack of co-operation & pretend for a while looking at the stars just like the people in The Towers remembering past lives because this lifetime offered so little getting stoned rather than step on their invisible brothers smoking the peaceful weed in the afternoon & giggling at children on swings cosmic love - so much easier cleaner than accepting any responsibility -in the old days people got stoned to forget for a few moments today being stoned is a way of life as crippling as television & christianity or newspaper worship and the 9 to 5 assembly line its 1968 & the assembly line pot smokers are here I'M AFRAID of the beautiful people they are crazy with their long hair - they are crazy and they are irresponsible assholes just like their parents - they dont want to make guns they dont want to kill - woe to the american ecconomy McDonalds has done more for integration than the Federal Govt... someone should give them a grant. negroes caucasions mongolians hippies (a different race) economic integration cultural integration, everyone after those 16 ¢ent hamburgers & 20¢ milkshakes the Superior Ave Shopping Center A BIG NOTHING the Outpost surrounded by funeral homes people living 4 in a room while those old mansions flash neon signs safe passage to the other shore give undertakers acid & the funeral parlors will all close down - give the mansions back to the people Rockefeller Train Depot or something a local landmark, traditional piece to give one that sense of historical perspective necessary to survive & grow - to insure stability it was torn down & replaced by a car lot in east Cleveland i have been accepted by people who do not know how to accept me by people who do not know who i am i am now a full-fledged initiate to the secret cult The Sub-Urban Society of Death human sacrifices before the altars of the tube i am hungry altho i have visited the refrigerator 176 times today i want to eat the television becoming the tube doesnt satisfy the hungry animals inside me i cant communicate with the damn thing - it just sez "little dot patterns as described by mcluhan" ive seen old people talking to the machine it never answered me i am still hungry collecting stamps doesnt satisfy my hunger i dont want to eat the stamps though (i like to smoke grass & look at them) if i try to become the stamp books, all they respond with is more mcluhan shit & also some crap about einsteinian relativity i am still hungry! theres nothing to do except change the kitty litter empty the garbage --- The death ship restaurant now only a block away - i go & have coffee maybe 3,4,10 times a day there is a strange sense of border freedom there - a clean feeling like when you leave the U.S. i watch the young greek cashiers tits a beautiful set of jugs full round ass watch the gold cross dangling over the tits - listen to Zorba The Greek played by a Mexican Band on the juke box - knowing, she never read Kazantzakis i sit at the table sometimes holding hands with my tantric grandmother more sex energy in her fingers than all the cunts in east cleveland the palm of her hand an orange flower of warm energy (if people knew what went on between our hands on the tabletop!) i drink coffee rap with friends dream of fucking all the waitresses not because i want to theres just nothing else to do it isnt safe to think in this country just write poems read books no place to grow just sit back - drink coffee damage chromosomes watch tho old world die & wonder what tomorrow will be like already knowing ill be an outlaw there too they are waiting for me in the future but then, ill be someone else screaming in the darkness sitting staring thru the paintings on the walls lost in the maze of mirror reflections not certain where i am or who i am i quietly ask myself who i am & the voice in my head reminds me "one of the sons of light, reborn" fuck that shit - i mean what does that mean dreaming of past lives the great teacher murdered for teaching about the sun just like Rev. King murdered - The Kennedys - murdered! symbols of the light - turned off & the telepath who rested in my head once & disappeared Vajra Yogini Help! Papa Legba - open the gates i dont want to die in Ohio anymore! I am tired of watching my brothers waste their lives fighting the draft to die in illegal wars i am tired of being torn-up inside each time i see one of my brothers replaced by a gold star in a window i am tired of writing & speaking to television vegetables immune to multiple-reality systems innoculated via mass media propaganda vaccines i am tired of reading about people starving in china, india, the ozarks in the inner city slums i dont understand theoretical economics my world is full of people & spirits i want to go where there are still some flashes of light my world is full of imaginary women with neon - electric flowers of love i want to go where i dont have to pretend 1 am not alone PART FIVE - talking to the wind someone sed i should write something constructive about east cleveland get me a passport - that's constructive! send me to a free country deport me to Milwaukee send me to the city of light or tell me how to get there & then - lets go! im afraid to go alone -- i dont see any other way this city within me can survive and I am already too old to be yr future you are always too safe you are always too late everyone wants to be jesus everyone wants to be martyred everyone wants to be a bodhisattva without getting their hands dirty it doesnt seem to matter anymore if the cause is just you do not know how to gamble and win you spend all yr time engaged in "meaningful dialogue" that never materializes into anything meaningful you waste all my time waiting for you to clarify things for me - you dont give me a choice - you dont give me a chance to decide you call yrself adults yet when you finally act it is out of frustration you feel yr imaginary power slipping you will not confront yrself so you leap to the aid of others very clumsy like children eating the sun or poets torn apart by internal frustrations like madmen & outlaws lashing out to destroy what they do not understand you put on yr creepy 12 year old naive armour and bring me yr cliches of wisdom that even you do not understand how many people have asked me "What do you want?" & then when i told them they walked away not understanding or afraid to understand "meaningful dialogue?" like "unarmed confrontation" i want to see the day when the city confronts me openly or sincerely for something other than information "I can open the doors for you" the voice sez & forgets to tell you the magic words, the words of power that stop you from having the door slam you in the face i can open my own doors and get them slammed in my face who needs help! i cant even read most of my poems in this country - i dont want to read them! you ask what i want and you are afraid to hear what i am afraid to say i wanted to say something about love but i dont think 1 could take any of yr paternal hogshit i really wanted to say something about love & the chance to grow into the adult you never had the courage to become but i dont think i have the time to hear all your freudian and jungian psychology defining what an adult is so 1 wanted to say something about love & instead ill just say, id just Iike you to quit putting my friends in jail & pay me for a poem once in a while & quit offering me so many non-paying opportunities ive given you so much free information i feel like the welfare dept (in Cleveland we got busted for giving away poems like the welfare dept the city officials were gagging on soybean & peanut butter poems - very strange!) i wanted to say something about east cleveland but it just walked away - PART SIX - a small funeral "the only difference between matadors & poets is that one flirts with death and the other with insanity" rik davis theyve almost all lied to you including me 1 suppose "the poet gambles with insanity" thats ridiculous - we are all insane it is up to you to wake up the poets lost in their eriee pasts the poet just eats & sleeps & pisses & farts & shits & writes poems - is that insanity thats a zen master on phenobarbital! its the businessman, the salesman who gambles with insanity - the doctor playing medicine - the printer the bomb-maker & the man who makes donuts & bagels from 9 to 5 awake at 6 AM driving a truck across the city to put in day after day in the same meaningless dance routine without even time to ask why poets lost in the luxury of being able to question being able to beat their head against the wall & say "well its my job" & they already know - they dont want the answers ah but that rapid transit matador being gored each day with invisible horns - internally & business transactions that didnt come & the CTS cowboy sitting silently trying to get a job - any job knowing he'll die of TB at 65 or cancer and unable to find a shred of meaning in the whole game ah the sweet insanity of being able to put away each hopelessly identical day while the matador gets a rose from a fat little greasy teenybopper in the crowd he gives her the bulls ears later in bed & a horny poet with poor vision cleans the picture up for you to help you dream but now you have television & you dream too much the garbage man in the morning knows his own reality garbagemen never get shot during riots perhaps they are the real holymen with an aura of protection their reality - the shit in yr bedroom wastebasket you have to be a zen master to be a garbageman & poets lie when they manage to find some object of beauty in the garbage heap garbage is garbage poetry is emotional garbage - leftovers and beautiful things are just dreams but now you have television to help you dream the soulless men bullfighters of insignificant stockrooms mindless phantoms who never possessed a spirit to gamble with men with high school television dreams who cross themselves in rituals of death who whisper "jesus" before dueling with their competitors each day playing war games - becoming policemen gambling with insanity they drive their autos laugh at hippies drink on fridays go bowling shit on God each day & they die & they die & they die alone wrapped in flags proud of their insanity & the academic poets write their cleaned-up dreams for you pretend it is all beautiful sitting in a bar the alcohol confessional & everyday i sit here trying to become one of you after another trying on those high school dreams for size it doesnt work you dont fit me as a poet i try to learn how to remain human despite technology & there is no one to learn from i am still too young to be quiet & contemplative i dont want to become a golden ager cowering before the tube in religious awe businessmen on amphetamine ego trips telling me about their latest coup i visit churches & temples & ask questions & i am handed some meaningless book or pamphlet it seems as if there is no one to answer my questions but me a hideous responsibility with worse implications my peer group? goodby television im going back inside my head my wife & i take an evening walk around the block (are we that old) there is something beautiful about her something some dream thing in the cloudless sky i know my dreams are unreal but they are my dreams sometimes on hot summer nights we hate each other & it is beautiful . . . august 1968 e.cleveland ohio note: peace & awareness are like two small birds trying to leave the planet because they are tired of dying im not advocating anything So much love for this D.A Levy Thanks so much to @dirtyred69 for recommending this amazing poet to me.

#poetry #da levy #beat #so much good #love this

SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM

#poetry #da levy #beat #so much good #love this

#da levy

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