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cras amet

 
                           O sure, I useta be angree with Ye, America
                           but when everything I loved, or needed
                           was taken away, my warm home and little dog, too
                           gone, I understood E.B.'s Art Of Losing as a favor
                           even though I could barely cipher my own crying
                           with the earth breaking
                           Under my bed
                           and the offices that hunted my last dime
                           (borrowed from a friend), the art of losing came easy
                           And saved me from losing my mind
                           
                           Like all things great or small, 
                           losing is no difficulty at all
                           Or worth getting too hung up on, 
                           over, or even obsessed
                           
                           things are things after all
                           
                           And no thing, institution or incorporation
                           is a thing to trust or call Great Parent,
                           
                           Fatherland
                           Motherland
                           University Animal Kingdom
                           but Quicksand--
                           It took Jerusalem
                           And an old man
                           To teach me
                           "No land is Holy, Sister"
                           
                           Not even the University Research Library of Hugh G Dick
                           Can hold its name against money, Chuckie Baby
                           
                           survey where it all began:
                           
                           O the University! O the University!
                           
                           II
                           
                           What is my Manifesto?
                           What is Not my manifesto.
                           
                           Static-dyslexic and hungry born
                           my baby world whirred a Vorticist's plume
                           With child eyes, I strained to read through radiation
                           of Johnson,  Nam, Nixon and Moon Men
                           and how to apply logic in sentences
                           brief, non-analytical, absorbed, but felt
                           in the absence of Dorothy's weeping Tin Man
                           though apparently parentless in the seventies
                           when every adult was hippyspock and baby lovin'
                           according to my first true father, Lewis Welch
                           who took a tour of the inner forest and never returned
                           (May he rest in peace if he is indeed not Sasquatch),
                           the world I saw began from Spam,
                           and there I spun on a Big Wheel of baby dreams
                           dreaming for the Ultimate Library
                           that someday, Underdog would swoop me away        
                           To call me Librarian Lu Lu, and say, "I love you. I love you."             
                           
                           My manifesto is like all the rest-- Exquisite
                           Corpse Bretonic Surrealist 
                           Kino-Eye-esque Futurist
                           Imagist Modernist 
                           Harlem-Renaissance-Est und zee
                           Zen Buddhist 13 Blackbirds 
                           13 Precepts Suturist that
                           could very well be said to be Palimpsest 
                           slapped under Palimpsest
                           
                           So I look to the Eye to read the Pravda
                           of benevolent Realisme in Rosellini and Dziga
                           And know what thou wilt according to the Law
                           if Law be known or the known ever realized
                           
                           And this has nothing to do with the multitude of pseudosciences
                           founded in the Masonic HermeticQuabbalisticRoscicrucian jibberjabber
                           But for the Green Force that flows through the Green Fuse
                           of the Green World in this Unreal Civitas (thank you T.S.)
                           
                           So my mind paints and is saved by paintings                      
                           Littering the concrete grafitti of imagination
                           Spliced every now and then, a Gertrude Stein nonce
                           And married with the real
                           if real be this, if real be this
                           
                           What is my Manifesto?
                           My manifesto is not sliced bread
                           
                           Sliced white bread of unpolysaturated fats
                           soluable in diet-Pepsi at the drive-thru, 
                           any drive-thru, 24 hours
                           
                           it freaked me out when I had to buy baguettes for the first time
                           and asked the bread lady, "Avez-vous pain... coupe en tranch?"
                           Which made her laugh and say, "amuseant,"
                           and send me off crying in fear of everything
                           
                           All my life, I had been afraid of Bread Ladies In Waiting
                           All my life, bread was sliced, sealed in seran, 
                           never never questioned
                           No interaction between baker and buyer
                           just pre-sliced, pre-buttered, pre-heated miricales
                           
                           And so I learned to believe in Peanut Butter
                           Jiffy's, Peter Pan, Skippy, Laura Scudders
                           the nuts that taught me Wonderbread was miracle flour
                           And so I dreamed to spread Pan upon Wonderpain
                           To fulfil my American purpose
                           To consume and be consumed by white fluff
                           
                           then I learned the world of pain
                           which hardens in a day
                           but crumbs well for swans
                           in Lac Leman, in Lac Leman
                           
                           
                           		III
                           		
                           		
                           		"Cras Amet!" My she-dog whelped
                           		in the sacred hour of Parnassus
                           		
                           	She secreted starshine for the Valley of my mind
                           	in an olden golden cave oozing with must and mold,
                           	and I embraced her as Heavenly Aegis, Isis, Mnemosyne
                           	for what Kusnacht could not teach Her, Hilda trained me
                           	along the vacant marinas of Versoix, "Cras Amet! Cras Amet! 
                           	Let those who have not loved today, love tomorrow--"
                           	And so I waited out the days and became expert at Xs
                           
                           In the sacred hour of our Pompeii-Parnassus
                           I learned the sacred art of reading, and crossing,
                           And took vow to Truth, then She with starshine
                           made Christmas from darkness, and Memory
                           lessoned forgetfulness to find New Beauty          ,
                           in Lac Leman where wind and wear were kind
                           
                                avec unbent alphabet, I wandered lost through Purgatoire, 
                                rue du Fer et rue de Rive pour patience, dipped in Paquis,
                                in Leman and Calisto, climbed Masada, floated Dead Sea
                                for patience and mercy, and there along the Via Della Rosa 
                                retrieved memory of little red book, Da's abandoned choruses;
                                All this with broken banjo and baby dreams,
                                never answers, save for reminders
                                that to trust was to experience  
                                the undressed Christ in us
                                and be blessed no less