BLUES IMPROVISATION

Blues played this time to a tinsel hazed rhythm of

guys in the street puffing away on cigarette butts,

highschool fifties kids wearing St Christopher medals

confessing to the blare of car radios and chrome antennae,

the music all the while witnesses to this night ,

dark as a senior prom dress.

Hopeless General Motors

puffing "Eli Eli Yale",

guilty despair!

“Progress is Our Most Important Product.”

Eisenhower shamefully laughing at something – maybe our poets?

Soft futility, tin tabulations of defeat

leaking through America’s emotional dams,

and the whole jackoff civilization grins

and the good ol boys drink more bourbon and toot coke.

We once took ourselves so seriously

like innocent solemn animals

gnawing off their infected legs.

We were educated away from the hopeful traps of hunters

bellowing rock–and–roll horns and factory whistles

as scientifically as the cold war.

Yet meanwhile,

unbeknownst to our Beat Generation,

America continued flexing its pornographic football muscles

while snickering at His intellectual pinkos

busy tittering stream of consciousness poetry

urbanely nested under His bed.

NYC 1969