Old Titans (Underneath America)

Part I

We are all a little windy lately, off balance but standing still.
Like a death wind blowing with the sails put away,
We can't move anywhere but there's no place to stay.
Go Away Old Titans, we don't need you tonight,
You haunt our dreams of freedom in our days of night despair.
I put Ginsberg in a box and told him to slip away.
Kerouac's gone and done howling I say!
He's a mute, white wolf now.
And that Junky slipped through my fingers towards junky Tangiers.
Yes, Old Titans, you are needed no more!
We've found your drugs with a brain on the floor.
The raven who quothe "Never more."
Said it for you, never for me.

I too have seen America laid flat on its back
To be fucked by Homer the Greek
Though it thought him Homer Simpson.I
too have seen late night crime on a box on the cold floor
With dribbling language defiling the temple of my ear
And I've escaped to a bottle where the end of it was as enlightening as -
Or as redemptive as -
All the match box closure of rolling the end credits.
No, I have seen nothing.

The ephemeral day is the roladex of the universe.
It reveals the limitations of our minds
Who close the bank of dreams while we make a run on it like it was 1933
When Auden was still alive and should have been wearing a crown.
He knew freedom. Whitman knew it too. Where have they gone?

But the days of language have met their end.
Conversations - Ha! I have seen the noose made up.
Where are the Old Titans now?
Escaping still into that night or that road?
My internet has a Cat O' Nine Tails and it has put me on no road.
I am whipped every day and night.
The glass whipped into my back gives me shimmering glimpses
Into the simplified life of anyone who dares blog (I am no exception. I am no Christ)
And I see their blog and I know them because I have made love to their words
Because their words are so silly, rediculous, forboding, redundant, meticulous
And corroding
And meaningless.
They throw their words to the ocean, like bottles in the sea
But no one can remember the sea any more.
Not you, not me, not me, not me.
We have other oceans to sail, other seas to traverse:
Knowledge Oceans, information delux, data, gossip, celebrity, perez
And I make love to their words all because their words are just nothing
With no conception of their nothingness.
Susan Boyle is to swine flu as we are to history;
Just the next thing in the line to oblivion.

So we aim our orgasms at the red sun and run around in circles,
Burning our eyes out with dumb cigarettes,
And frenzied coffee stares - coffee has not been proven bad for health yet! -
And our green earth wilts still!
There aren't enough hotels in the world to house all the fears we create
For ourselves in the bathrooms and junkyard alleys.
I have seen all the statistics.

Let me breathe carcinogens, I'll call myself a Martyr.
Let me eat at McDonalds, I'll call myself King.
Let me forget terrorism, I'll call myself Dreamer,
I Have an ocean full of swine,
I write letters to the government.
This Poem Has No Filter.
I'll make love to Castro for a Cuban Cigar.
I'll shoot JFK so I can save him again.
On and on, yes, on and on.

In America April is not the cruelest month.
Its December, when the bums freeze and when the bums die -
The bums and hobos, homeless and deaf, who are, I am starting to believe,
The wisest creations we have in our midst.
Yes! The wisest ones we have.I
salute always to President Hobo
Who has seen beatings and crack dens and babies alone.
I have never seen these.
Who has seen rapes and murders and blood not spared.
I have never seen these.
Who has seen prostitutes work for less than minimum wage.
I have never seen these.
Who have not seen the end of the bottle and never black out
Who have tangled with police for a bench and a howl
For a place to rest, a bed, a park,
Who do not smoke weed or take LSD so they can brag
But take heroine and crack and alcohol and cigarettes to live
And curse at the forgetful cities who denied them the talent of Coltrane, Armstrong.
They know to live is to live is to live is to live
That there is no inbetween.
I have never seen these.
To either hunger or be dead is to live is to live.
There is no internet or Susan Boyle (whom everyone has forgotten already)
There is no Hilton or recycling becuse there is hunger too hard
Or Forward onto the next thing while we forget to read and talk
And lose homes in recessions because the Moloch of Morgage
Wound a clock too tight so the center could not hold.
And maybe we too are becoming bums, but we know we are not.
Not at least until China calls in our debt to make us vagabonds on the universal curb
Not till then will we be wise,
Know hunger
Salute the president Hobo -
The one Dos Passos ended his trilogy with while we vomited on an airplane.

Part II

All my pleasures are like yesterday,
With the blind flow of motion, the waves taking me under America
Where in the sewers the secrets are sacred.
The women who weep
In Orange trees
Feel the breeze
Under America, this labrynth of mirrors.

('Stop this silliness you are thinking' - this poem is pretense
No one has yet found the tense we need and no one has dared.
Where is the post tense, I ask you. Where?
So I live under America
And it is not for you vague reader who has come so far to reject this notion,
But for the conicise who have paid their way with eyes.)

So I live under America
Where the flotsam of dreams meet the jetsam of desire;
Where cannibals feast on Shakespeare and Chaucer
Under the dim florescent light called God in our midst.
Where the darkness forges forgetful sorrow, disregarding
All things beautiful, symmetrical, corrupt, and forlorn.

We shall dine at the feast of the Craigslist Killer
(Who's only sin was murder).
There we shall discuss the origins of species and to conclude we'll curse Darwin's name.
"We came out of no primordial soup," say we,
"That degrades everything in us."
We emerged from glorious chaos - beauty unparalleled
Because it is so lost beyond perception.
We shall overcome - someday
To return to where we went or came
To say 'Holy, Holy' in someone's name.

Can it be that the halo is the storm of the angel,
The symbol of frightful submission,
Giving rise to the tepid, torrential, and modern waves of guilt and rage?
Curse the waves and lift them all.
I'll not be damned under a sea.
Mickey Mouse is sorceror no more!
We can bash the heads of our overlords against the curbside,
Watch clouds bleed from their heads,
The dreamstuff escaping. We are our own kings. Never forget.

Democracy Overcrowded, let the small ones be alive
Let the old ones be dead, let the poor be complete
Let the powerful be light, and the dead be content.

Wherefore art thou Old Titans?
Fire rages in the belly underneath America
Consuming its static flies and maggot squatters.
Is the question of life to be a nomad or dead?
Or are we condemned to an eternal safety
That burns hotter than hell and bores with a vengeance,
Littered with statistics of cancer and anti-smoking trends.
We are supposed to not do so much
Its amazing we can do anything at all.
This is the truth emblem emblazed on each stamp
Underneath America
Where the postal system still thrives.

Part III

No.
Forgive me.
Today I am anxious, not seeing through my fog.
Lights seem dimmer and fading into distances.
If I am left alone on the London streets I would die;
Jack the Ripper still lurks in the valley of life.

Do not hold on, but go always into whatever you can find.
I fear it is too late for this one. I am already lost.
Leave me here, those who can leave, you should.
The waters on this rocky river bank are grey and undrinkable.
Soon there will be deserts all around me and black clouds above.
I'll try my best not to think about it
Though I know that I will.

The rain falls gently. I see it collect at the end of my nose
And fall off into the oblivion of earth.
I do not seek shelter or use my hands to shield myself.
I am winter today
And the rain cannot melt me.

The Old Titans have left us for good.
We know this now.
When the rain began they fled into the wilderness and oceans.
But how we need them still.
They've run off with America on the road to the secret Mexico
Known only to the borderlanders who collect magic from the bleeding earth.
God to be on the road! How maliciously sweet.

I emerged from Underneath America and breathed the fresh air,
Then was grabbed and brought below,
Tangled in the mess of a hundred handed beast.

My eyes have grown grey and sleepless.
The rain tastes like heavenly copper.
The river swells.
Grow villain, grow, grow, and grow.
Listen to that wind who brings the rain in its arms
And will take it away when the hour comes.
All the while I'll sit here and try to be a monk
With my cuorduroy and sallow, unbiblical thoughts.

The energy of youth has been turned into clay!
The lavish night is imprisonned by day!
The stars are no miracles, just burdens to know!
The Titans from dreams have been laid down low!

Arise new Titans from the lava filled streams!
Go forth and give birth to apocryphal dreams!
Light new lights down the tunnels of woe!
Rearrange the life we think we still know!

I remember:I have held lightning in my hand,
Electric as the original seed of man.

The ocean swells are the Lord's orchestra in the holiest world of all.
They smash into rocks and make the earth new,
Forming cliffs and beaches through millenia of cycled moons.
Not one Ocean asks "Is this it?"
Because they cannot because
They are it, the one consuming ever lasting all.
Their breath is our life; their age our time;
Their salt, our knowledge;
Their eternal, our mortal;
Their holy is the only holy.

Cancel my vision or rewind my tongue,
I will still say we are ocean children,
Born anew to know and understand that Titans do not die.
They rest dormant in eternal seas.

And writing will never die while there are pens to write.
And America will never die, it will only move on.

New births! Carnivore storks! All abound in the valley.
In unlikely pairings we slowly come to know truth
And there is truth yet to come, indeed.

Take your passport and fly on good soldier
To the undertaking of the sky.

5/09