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JIM COHN
Foxy’s
Strip clubs are so sad, but the saddest
Are those rundown roadhouse joints,
The ones at the edge of town,
On county roads across from cemeteries, like
Foxy’s, where even on a good night
The girls don’t make enough gas money to get home,
Even if the men turn over entire
paychecks.
The women must be higher, more desperate
Than those playing the higher class
clientele,
Lapdancing for guys that can’t pay the
mortgage,
That sleep in cars behind old barns
filled with swallows,
Pulling aside a triangle, a few threads
of pink thong,
For someone not even on the unemployment
rolls,
Taking home less than a poet at a
pass-the-hat reading.
The men don’t learn the consequences of
frequenting brothels,
Laying with a different woman every
night,
And the ladies, not really making love to
them,
Not knowing who they were, not caring who
they are,
Only seem like the weariest of ghosts,
even the beauties,
Constantly turning their faces to the
mirrors,
Checking their reflections glazed in
neon.
26 April 2008
Clarity
Clarity, you’re like the lavender sheets
for my bed,
But right now the ones on the bed are
blue.
I love you more than Catherine Deneuve,
Uma Thurman,
The prophetic tradition, raw forces at
work
Undisturbed all around us, the emptiness
nothing can fill.
It’s all pretty unsettling, the things we
cannot control,
Twisted to the breaking point, until the
flesh falls away.
I think you said what needs fixing doesn’t
need to be fixed at all
And still, I’ve been thinking about you
all day,
Brilliant and green, sharp and
terrifying, adorned with disks of light,
Meditating on envy until surrounded by
consorts and deities.
11 May 2008
Air Show Day Dream
for
Dave Cope
Leafing through an enormous hardbound
copy of Recording the Beatles,
Feeling like I’d just rolled a pair of
sevens,
Even after reading Levon’s
telling of how Richard really shook things up
When he hung himself by his
belt in the tour bus bathroom.
I see that
Same as Dave Cope, who lost both parents
within a three month span, Only the premier’s page is filled with videos of
himself spinning niceties to Earthquake victims & Dave’s is like the
violinist
That left his Stradivarius in a cab.
There’s no such thing as ordinary or
holy.
Everything––meadows, birds,
mountains––all embodied compassion.
Unfocused Mind––not blue or black or
without excruciating feeling of Solidity, falling away––indiscriminant of rich
or poor.
How sad sd the
poet & then he himself said––no one knows this person.
The key is don’t
overthink it, Bonnie told me.
I was putting shucked corn into a pot of
boiling water,
Just come in the door, raining as it was, big sheets of rain.
Joe drowned on a fishing trip, Ruth
stayed in the bar business.
Helping me out of the lean depression
years, when I could not make
Myself focus on what had changed and what was
real
And what was for nothing and what was a
dream
Was a dreadnought of experimental places
Under the influence of a highly
experimental black star.
The floors were maple, but covered with
linoleum.
The walls were brick, but plastered over
and painted red.
Free in all ways, uninhibited, giving and
taking away freely,
Acting conventionally, countering
convention––
I had my own bizarre audio trip going,
Stacking the voices like I’d loved in
soul music,
Happy to sing all night about rivers and
goddesses.
29 May 2008
Ode To
Emmylou Harris
Her aim was that there be
a place to enter,
To gouge the wound in healthy flesh
And wear it like the finest embroidered
silk.
I would come back from where thus will do,
Where not
thus will do, where thus and not thus will do,
All the while weeping into the heart of
song
Knowing none of it could be grasped.
I would come back from my isolation of
dismantling or constructing,
Attentive of the favorable and adverse
swept away,
Of all the strict ways of carrying an
open jar of oil across a white rug,
Making cement in a crystal wine glass.
The sun lives lightyears, the moon a
night––how do you understand it?
Who would you tell of the one great
matter worth reporting?
Red
Rocks,
6
June 2006
Super Death
–after the
painting “Super
Muerto” by Artemio
Rodriguez
The humans were all dead,
killed when the Fourth Sun fell in a
torrent of rain. . .
. . . apparently
saw Romero’s original Night of the Living
Dead somewhere
around 60 times prior to the age of
5. As a result,
childhood fear of Graveyards, dead
returning from the grave
hungering for human flesh. There’s a
photo my father has of mom
as a zombie showgirl, him as a
zombie hippie gnawing on a hand
Delighted and surprised, I
embrace her; but as I imprint the first
kiss on her lips, they became
livid with the hue of death.
She had a lethal way of
expressing derision toward anything
The Count cared for. It would appear on her face
as a holistic
rejection. Then, in a moment when
suddenly The Screamers pulled
the levers . . .
Super Frankenstein examines
what may have happened if
Frankenstein's monster had
been raised as a crimefighter instead of
a monster. The creator,
Victoria Frankenstein, is more gentle to her
creation than the original scientist.
The result is an unlikely
superhero who protects
inducing trances, ecstasy, the
experience of the divine, the
realization of one’s own secret nature,
and, finally, mergence into
the divine essence.
The “fear not” gesture (abhaya-mudra), bestowing protection and
peace,
is displayed by the second
right hand.
He is the dissolution of the
universe, (Yamantaka) –– Ender of
the
Tamer, He who exterminates
Death
11
June 2008