This is a song we used to blast in the golden static of wheat
the incipience of autumn 1996, the teardrop autumn when
every Friday was golden, the sun a radiant bulb of suffering
light bleating into the planet with translucent planks of light
eyelashes culled from some other world, all the time youth
dancing, youth escaping, the feeling of eternity and poetry
and coffeehouses and oneness, the geometry of limbs
configured in the shape of a human heart
surrounding the tables of Lums, ashing out expired
dreams into hockey puck sized ashtrays reading (always)
reading Walt Whitman and Sexton and Ginsberg
crying when Ginsberg desecrated the city where I lived
as sacred, yelping out "Holy Peoria" when reciting
the footnote to Howl reading Kerouac, calling it
"Kerouacking" every time we would grab a venti coffee
and a pack of smokes and jump into the sunken face
of my old Buick and just motor the fuck out into the
country, driving fast down the dust latitude of dirty roads
with the windows cranked south
bathing in the pond of open air that is reality
Trying to break free of the casket before being buried
we wanted the security of having enough in the bank
we wanted to experience dipping our torsos
into the spring newness of a muses interior thighs
we wanted life and pain and forgiveness and love
But at that time, we wanted to express ourselves
As when I hear this song today
twelve years later thinking about
the young poet trying to stretch the interior
of his skin around the steeple-shaped blocks
of the English alphabet and failing, a muzzle
manacled around his fingertips and everything
falling infinitely short with the exception of the
loose training wheel of his jostled heart.
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