This past three weeks, I have been collaborating with Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke & Ric Williams on a 26-part poem, mushroom, in a tube. I can only thank Michael for kick starting the project by forwarding on the first part of the poem, inspired by an encounter back in 1996, when a stranger walked up to him and said, ‘here’s ten dollars, man’ and promptly planted said 10′er in his hand. From this gesture, has grown a poem with a spirit as free as the man who inspired it.
In composing the poem, all three of us agreed to push our writing into new territory. To extend the creative spirit. It is our plan to make sure this poem makes its way into the world, but more on that as things develop. For now, I want to share three sections of the poem showcasing the voices of Michael, Ric & myself. But, in keeping with the openness of the project, our names will not be assigned to any particular section.
May the words take you…
**********
g.
a masonic lodge
besieged by monkeys & women
feed them fish & grapes
&, & this is the most significant
triplet in this
holy sequence
granddad, why did
you steal a pomegranate?
it has no intrinsic value, grandson
OK, back to where
t+he action really
happens to be
today under a poem_e_granite tree
o.
they will find my body before
the moon slips off its black
latex glove: :before the trapped
dog chews through its hind leg
transmitters wired
into the left ventricle
shift blood out the door
in a fevered alley, in an un-
marked cul-de-sac, the ex-
ecutioner’s perfume all over
your hands: :a line is drawn
triumph of incision
mopping up the gush
of now
r.
poets too are frauds
as complicit as
the murderer
of light &
shadow
unname
everything
we claim in
dreams & say
“if paradox is not
& what i hold is nothing
as nothing is all of
dogma crushing
a mountain”
a grain
of grit or as
Ram Dass said:
“everybody is a hustler”
every hustler
is holy . . .
at an imaginary poetry
reading all poems
as scintillating
as fresh as
pressed
galaxies
with all the hot gas
swirling out electric tendrils
like Buddha’s last paisley dream
of a perfect Govinda burping the holy
names of everything never
conceived in the mind
of man . . . neti . . .
neti . . . neti . . .
swoosh
