Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

in one sense I believe i only ever wrote one poem
that poem exists in eternity, what I mean by that
is there is no time but now, and then
when I was who I was when I wrote my first poem

my first poem was not the first poem that I wrote
it was the poem I call my first poem
the reason for this is because, that poem
felt like some kind of breakthrough

where as everything I wrote before that point
seemed like a kind of research, a searching
on the night that I wrote my first poem
I had a strange feeling that I was going into
a kind of trance, I had been reading one of
my favorite French writers, and listening to
Miles Davis Sketches of Spain

suddenly somewhere in the darkest hour
the first lines of the poem began
like I had discovered a document
in the sands of Egypt, the words rumbled
out of my pen, I had no idea of what I was
writing

it was like the walls began to move, like veils
I saw pages
turning in some book of eternity, my red head girl
friend was drawing pictures of junkies in big
stuffed chairs, Mile's horn was like a magic carpet
I was floating on an enchanted gypsy wind
I could hear the screams of young girls
on the roller coaster down below
on the boardwalk,

waves moving on the wall...I'm up on east cliff
a block away from a view of the pacific ocean
the raunchy boardwalk is off to my right
on this night, I could get there by walking
on a railroad trestle, I spent many late nights
there walking down there

on the boardwalk along the arcades, when everybody
had gone home, and the roller coaster was silent
with the moon shining through the steal structure
the waves crashing on the shore of my lonely mind