you cannot know

[revolutionR]

that night in the phone booth on East Cliff
Philip said to me...'you cannot know what it was like
to be a surrealist in the twenties'
and I decided right then, i would
make it my life, to try know what it was like

my journey as a poet had just begun
I did a lot of writing before I even thought myself, a poet
at what point do you call yourself a poet
when you talk to the famous American surrealist poet
on the telephone, and can't even call yourself a poet yet
it's a tall order, to try to live up to the calling

Philip's poetry came into my life at the precise juncture
it was meant to, I truly believe that, I had just started reading
the Beat writers, but mostly it was Rimbaud and Baudelaire
there is a silver thread running through certain poets
who come along at a prescient moment, and their words
speak to you through the shadowy curtains of the arcane ages

What I had to know, about being a surrealist in the twenties
was that it would most likely take me my entire lifetime to know
and what that would be, would depend upon on how well I
listened to what they had to say, and what was said about what
they had to say... ad infinitum

the alchemy of the word, Rimbaud spoke of, and so it was
and it was no coincidence, however it was, an objective chance
that somewhere in Paris France that the surrealists would congregate
in the twenties, and practice the exquisite corpse of the centuries