damned one

[revolutionR]

What I mean when I say, I am not a great thinker
that I think at all seems to me some kind of feat
a poet who thinks too much is not a poet at all
and if that last line seems like a sublime contradiction
then so be it, this is what I mean about thinking at all
A lot of things that seemed important to me, when I first
began thinking about poetry, now seem less compelling
or even though they still are necessary to my thought
they have become more at some distance, so as to still
resonate with a certain urgency, yet they are now full
Of all the great or lesser poets that I have read, over
the years, I still adhere to the ones that inspired me
in the beginning, I always felt the need to always keep
certain poets close at hand, certain writers, thinkers
and since I began with poetry, all else was only adjunct
my calling was arranged by my need to follow the word
to follow the words of the ones that spoke to me, the
most eruptive drastic convulsive, most outlandish
contradictory, I somehow knew that I had little chance
of some educated study of a career that was substantial
under my tight belt, all those choices required abundant funds
of rubles, and good luck, some ground from which to spring
not coming into this world with much of either at my disposal
I somehow know that if I wanted to make any difference at all
I would have to fall, I would have to be a failure, an outcast
a pariah, but even so the ranks of the poets were required to
be so, it does not really follow that one should be blessed
with acceptable credentials, in order to sit on the edge of town
and look at the world with anything other then a gypsy eye
a view of the junkyard of humanity, the heap of history, lies
painted as religions for the dregs of what we are told to believe
I cannot believe any map of destinations that was a forgery
of the natural laws that governed existence before deception
became the sign of the cross on the hill of the dead god
before language was raped by the language of the chosen ones
I am not so chosen, nor would I be if I had a choice, in this foist
I am not so bitter, I have not tasted sweetness enough to know
I have drank the wine of street and drowned my despair in concrete
I have nurtured my madness with flowers of evil and drugs of the poor
I found my courage in the used book store in a copy of prescriptions
from the angry writers of poems who have drank from the milk of
paradise, have followed the tortured sentences of the damned one
I have walked in the morning dew of the flower children, dropped
the sacrament of the revolution of the most high from the most low
dropped out, no matter how they blamed us for having, doing nothing
but I will to walk away from the organized insanity of hierarchy hell
if I started out with little, then i would look for little where it lived
I have no need for Buddha, or Jesus, or the obscene ass, this too shall
pass, I will lay about in the grass and dream of tigers and opium dens
and then I will write another poem about all the great poems ever written