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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
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