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Choruses
Excerpt
Choruses for
Allen Ginsberg, 1926 - 1997, and Lucy Goldman I. within
the muted flight of daybreak, inside its leaked, trembling light
of
birth, after the cracked shell of night’s dome has split open, cut
loose a flurry of pitched voices grown from different, linguistic sperm, we
hear a cacophony of opposing rhythms integrated inside the body of a song, carried
as if upon the widespread feathered wings of a bird across the sky of
imagination, as in the circling, beating mantra the heart knows as
breath becoming choruses, becoming soundtracks lifted
off a poet’s chanting tongue, syllables become moments within
moments, are transformed into song that
sings beautiful as any morning glory colors when the sun slants down, cuts
through whatever is there with its golden blades, becomes beams bright
& sharp as voices heard anywhere hands meet drumheads of skin tightly
pulled, the rhythms vibrating there in skimming waves washing
in or out at you as if they were imitating foaming sound rolling in from the
sea, curling tips of its waves into shape of grigri lips that can be cataclysmic as
foam sudsing of lips of madmen moaning, or roaring, or
doing whatever it is that madmen do, in katmandu, in the center of
nepal, or on the streets of new york city, where voices fire up pitches fast
as old satchel paige threw a baseball down the heart of the plate or
snaked it across inside or outside corners disguised as an aspirin, like
sound nicks away edges of language, chips off syllables & meaning, until
the voice cracks words electric as static, perhaps
resembles the sound lightning bolts make when ripping off small pieces of
dark space & sky when
thunder cracks its jagged whip across the night’s high gloom there,
where wolves sing love songs to the moon, where lookeloos crane their
necks on freeways trying to spot hale-bopp comet’s streaking silver ice tail,
who listen to
songs of beck over the radio hightailing it lickety-split through this
dark out west, burning rubber signatures into asphalt, as cars wheel
in & out of traffic, screech brakes, shape a kind of music, a new language only
the initiate know & imitate as it twists itself around again & again,
doubles-back
in the way rhythm turns in & back on itself, like
a concrete pretzel claiming its own place as it curls into space, lifts
off in the shape of interwoven, interlocking freeway ribbons carrying cars &
speech above our heads on conveyer belts as motors screaming high speed octane,
zooming around curves like crazed vagabonds hitting
moments of sweet need, as music fills the air with magical incantations wrapped
in voices that track down sound, then double back blue as terror recycles
itself through years when good old boys guzzled beers on
back roads of america in a slew of cars that sped down roads twisted as limbs
of people suffering
from rheumatoid arthritis, gunracks over their faces, grinning
like cheshire cats who just ate a slew of canary birds, yellow
feathers scattered all over that sordid history &
everywhere blood on whiskers of hyenas, blood frozen in ice- cold
stares of serial killers, blood in drawing rooms of politicians practicing blood
sports, bullshitting us in washington, blood on the cheese face of a leering moon
after eclipse hung down over rancho santa fe, blood on grimacing faces bursting
from bloated black bodies in rwanda, blood exploding from that incinerated
house in waco, texas, blood shooting from the eyes of a child before he
pulled the trigger in paducah, kentucky, blood in the speeches of ministers pontificating
from pulpits, blood all up in the curdling screams sliced clean through
by razors, blood smeared all over the blues choruses
of screams heard chilling after explosions in jerusalem, in
the choruses of hand grenades tattooing the nights of bulgaria, colombia, in
the choruses of machine gun bursts stitching the evenings of mexico city, los
angeles, that snuffed out the life of notorious b.i.g., tupac in las vegas, choruses
of fire meeting choruses of bullets, choruses of hand grenades greeting
the imploding language of love, blood on the syllables, choruses spewing
blood on musical notes that sing of these times everywhere &
blood on money pulled from ocean bottoms by deep-sea divers, blood
up in the voices of poets impregnating stanzas with music, blood
on tongues cut off because they sang beautiful images of love, blood
where the land mines littered the earth with eyeballs, skulls,
& severed hands that point accusatory fingers stiff as bones in the mud, &
choruses & blood & choruses & blood, choruses & blood, behold
the time-clocks ticking inside blood irrigating flesh, inside
the moment when the poet knows language as a wellspring, inside
the moment when truth is understood as a two-headed sword that is duplicitous
as the notion there is a true beauty in flesh, lyrical with movement, final
as death, time marches on, leaves’ flesh imprinted with maps of spiderweb sites,
that spread across the body’s internet, as songs pealing across this
embezzled air tantalize us with history of our continued failure
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