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Dead Letter Office, Dept. of January
Received via Time Tunnel from Norman, Okla., January 1981
Dana:
This poem is an iron lung; without it I would die. I come to this poem unevenly dressed in all my imperfections, ready for the dance which this poem has in store. This poem has the dance of morning starlight on just-clean streets, the dance of brown grey brown frozen grass, the dance of human human frowning hunger, all in store ready for me & me preparing like a thin little Buddha for it. Without this poem, I am seaweed washed up a shore, dried out on a driftwood post.
The driftwood post is a piece of fence, broken by years & years of people walking over, by bold winter breezes wooshing the beach. This poem has taken us to Shipbottom NJ where foolish young lovers huddle close on a cold May beach in sleeping bag under blankets. This poem is a remembering and a forgetting. This poem is an excorcism. It's a long drive to Shipbottom in dark cloud night, the poem has seen it. It has seen to it.
Then there is the night of much drink, marijuana or coarse powdered speed. Greg T---, wild New Yorker lover of sweet thin blonde Czech, at the wheel of his crazy power Trans Am. Fine madman Jew racing from the Poolhalls somewhere outside Lawrenceville through the woods (not the Pinebarrens) & trees in a line on both sides of the two lane for miles & miles all like a true night tunnel singing love mad through clear speed fog. The poem was there& I was there so even almost three years later, it’s all recorded almost faithful. How this poem & speed taught me to shoot a mean game of pool for one night while rambling talk flowed out & for one night I was a true Neal Cassidy of the 70’s. But maybe it was a part of a dream, a little vicious vicarious speed dream & my pool wasn’t so mean & maybe all my talk was to nothing more than my personal ghosts. So which was it, true speed satori, or dream? Was it the lady or the tiger? This poem says it was the tiger.
This poem has watched me rolling cigarettes & smoking them, all part of my quiet meditation ritual. For almost twenty minutes it has seen me sit with cigarette between fingers of left hand, a modern day Prometheus man. The hand which dare seize the fire.
Drinking coffee. Need another. Brew me another cup, just one more before the night is through. It’s six: twenty-seven right now & cold cold cold. This poem knows what you don’t, though you might have suspected, that I have finished reading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums just about an hour ago & maybe it has infected this poem. “Saint Jack” Ginsberg called him & could be he was right cause in this book Jack is closer to Zen than he or Alan Watts could realize. His only fallacy is his “working on my Buddhahood,” like my “working on my sainthood.” All this working on is a sham lie phantasm as much so as is consciously not working on, in order to gain Enlightenment. It’s all mistaking the path for the goal & the Master’ll give us a swift kick or push us splashing into a lake. And what is this jive I’m writing down but words words words & more words. Don’t mean shit without our pitiful proud minds & since thoughts are no more than vapours, what can words be? Actions mean something me bucko something more than a million of those words. And how often our actions put the lie to our words. I know mine do.
The world is holy as it is today as it was & ever shall be whether people are around to know it or not. And within us we are beautiful handsome you & I & all of us. If we are free enough to drop our defenses of supposed physical ugliness, this truth will be manifested & all will see it. It isn’t necessary to look in the mirror saying “I am free truly free though dying I will be free beyond Death. In my freedom, I am holy; I am handsome beautiful. This is the incarnation of my Holy Ghost.” No need to say all that so long as you are aware of it within & others can’t help but notice the pleasant change. And for once perhaps I have followed the teaching of my sermon, for many have said how good I look. Just the other morning, my boss said I looked almost healthy. And nothing drastic has changed but my outlook.
This poem would like to be meticulously copied for my records before mailing, but it will remain as is for your eyes with all the parenthetic phrases which have no parentheses or Emily Dickinson—dashes—all here as is with another poem on the flip side.
See ya 'round the corner,
jac
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