The river is frozen but no one really thinks it will thaw, except maybe the old captains no one listens to, anyway, and the engineers, who no one sees until something breaks. This is not the new ice age, but the same old one on repeat. In the age of streaming no one remembers shows getting syndicated. After 100 shows you’d find your favorite prime time show playing between after school cartoons and the 6 O’clock news in situ in perpetuity, until one day, perpetuity runs out.
The current in situ perpetuity will run out, too.
I participated in a lovely reading celebrating the life and memory of Beat ingenue, Neal Cassady. He’s the latest to get rehabbed and retconned, having finally been acknowledged for the influence he had over the work of Kerouac, who’s probably been watered down and worked over enough. Of course they light candles to Neal now that he’s dead, long dead and beyond being able to spend the royalties on a pack of smokes,a pull of whiskey, a crisp, cold beer, or a damn hamburger with all the fixin’s. But it’s important in this time of having to again define what it means to be from the United States, what it means to want to make art, what it means when you want your life to be art, to be a poem, in these the falling days of the Post-American Century. It’s important to remember that somewhere in the heart of all this mass-medificated misinformation we bleed for more than just dollars and dream of more than to be the latest anti-social media influencer.
I am trying to remember what it means to be part of a community again; it used to feel something like second nature, but I have stripped myself down to component parts and am rebuilding again. It’s good to remember our literary and otherwise roots, good to know where we’ve come from because that helps tell us where we’re going. I can never get over feeling awkward, wandering into readings like gunslinger, all alone with a holster of poems and a stomach full of rage that I keep hearing needs to be love
being told so by people who do not understand they are the exact same thing.
a motor
is an easy bit
of tech
transforms
the in
visible
into
work
motion
a spinning pinion
a fan a flywheel
a few words
a poem
like ol; Doc
(William Carlos)
Williams said
I meant to read some poems from my forthcoming collection, The Call Sign is Jonah, but instead dug out an 11-year-old poem, “A Few Lines for Ernesto Cardenal,” one of my favorite Latin American Poets: poet, priest, Sandinista, who prayed for the troops before they went off to fight the CIA backed death squads supporting Somoza. He would eventually break from them when Ortega took over the party and turned into the same kind of bloody dictator that Somoza was. He was, like Whitman, a pure American Poet: American in the sense that the entire western Hemisphere is America, and not just the United States. So I read from an old poem, written nine years before his death. Had I known he was in Cincinnati in 2011, I might have tried to go and see him, but I was drunk somewhere in a northern tundra, waiting for a marriage to die and spitting words at the fascists sitting on the country board.
Here at home, the Mayor McPhoto Op is continuing his clean city campaign by attacking unregistered donation boxes. When he goes after the little libraries, will the conservative party finally embrace him for what he is?
