with David Gollub (in italics)
In the museum of beats and odors Spritual rhythm inertial springs of complex drums a complex artifact out of backyard salvage of Jah nervous audience Jitters of traditions knotted into the dancing muscles meaning NO MORE TRYING, no more running to find oneself. Ah, but she of the elaborately beaded cornrows. to whom dreads were just another hairstyle, She is of moving rhythms, overlapping overriding considerations if she knew it, as she knows so many other things She would know the impossible gospel mind fuck. * No politics—Please, I’m inhuman— I can barely remember what tropisms I’m supposed to manifest And when someone mentions “ ”—I forget everything. Sure I could go on the road robbing banks, if I bothered to find a straight man Or I could be a priest—anything but con a vote as the bee sucks, on the roses bloom on the black velvet and ladies gasp on antimacassar chairs, not understanding what happened to the roses on the wallpaper, or for that matter the wall plain as the pimples on their noses plainer than their pastor’s sermons on the apparently unwheeled vehicles of Grace No—I’d rather be a shoveler of shit, even on Sunday, than forge the finest of shovels if it were only to lie out in the rain and rust. * What kind of king the people in this room deserve to be subjects of would amuse a venereal diseased tyrant to calculate, allowing, of course, for alchohol blood levels and varieties of religious experience their just desserts and their unjust deserts their purple mountain majesties and their mean schemes for the aerial baptism of the starving or horny It’s a big fat world out there, but a small, starving one in here Let the aliens come and bore one hole in my head for the light of each star to come in It’s been too long since I’ve seen a sea scene. But what can one expect, having settled on the moon for the climate, or lack thereof A king of such cretin cratered creatures would have an easy time gathering taxes, if there were wealth, material or spiritual, to gather. But as it is, alcohol evaporates into the misbegotten rationalizations of anti-deodorant armpits leaving our hypothetical kind with his severed head under an unsympathetic arm Spouting anti-metaphysical and rational doctrine at intervals as regular as those of Old Faithful, but with no contamination of faith If elected, I will not be saved—If served, I will not eat.
10 November 1979