The Carnival of Drunken Poets

Ran into Kerouac at the Carnival of Drunken Poets,

where those just dead meet those about to be reborn.

Jack and I have wandered through the zodiac, prodigal suns

under the 13th sign, the sign of inebriation in the house of Lilith,

with Coyote rising, the Moon single and pregnant again.

We meet here every 26 thousand years.

 

The heavenly huckster sees us coming and shouts: "Step right up!

Watch gladiator-poets beat each other silly with roses.

One will die of wounds that gush communion wine!”
The crowd is ferocious, hungry for metaphors.

I bow to Jack, Jack bows to me.

We make the fatal mistake of opening our mouths.

 

"Gorilla lilies at my Resurrection!" he wails.

I refute him, "We forbid the silly physicists of tantra

to taste our semi-sweet chakras,” 

to which he replies, "I spin galaxies of cotton candy

from the dark matter of God's breath."

I demand, "What overflows the hexagon of your hollow grail?"

He answers, "Honey from the horny void!" 

I shout, "Supernova crème brulée!"

And Jack replies, "Why should the midnight hummingbird

not sip rainbows from my wounded eye?"

I insist, "Nanno-galaxy in the groin of an electric frog!"

Jack says, "A medicine woman must dance in your amygdala."

 

It's no use, I'm weeping now, as Jack, the master sommelier,

whispers, "Dip the brackish water from the womb,  extract

the secret chi, burn the afterbirth as inexhaustible green fuel."

I can only reply, "Drop a song of worms into the beak

of my feathery daughter as she stumbles into the sky."

Jack murmurs, "When I set the loaf of my body on fire,

God will blow out the flame, I will become snow."

 

Then I shout: "Broken motors of the pharmacopoeia

dripping petroleum in the rainforest of your neurons."

But he answers, "Subatomic Obama!"

I moan, "May insect helicopters infest the Amazonian

Chacruna leaves in your President's ayahuasca."

 

Now the mind-police prepare their post-modernist bonfires. 

I attempt a more rational inquiry: "If Mary Magdalene consumes

the body of the Lord, then exhales the vaporized brandy

of his ascended flesh, what shape is frost on memory's window?"

He says, "Dissolve in the April of the heart and taste your tears,

then confess that love and pain have one flavor."

But already the crowd has lit the pyre, shouting by torchlight,

"Burn the Bodhisattva who exuberates our bellybuttons!"

 

Epilogue: The Death Of Kerouac...
They bind the lamb-white French Canadian football star,

cat lover, bhikkhu of cheap wine; his bone-smoke dims the sky.

O sound of neon thrush eggs crackling in the 12th House!

O clangor of rose-window dragonfly wings shattering spacetime!

O keening of genetically-modified caterpillars with no eyes! 

Kerouac's marrow a cloudy holocaust of rainbows

unfolding the eleventh dimension of my adoration,

the pavonine horizon of his beatnik smile, staining the dome

of eternity with fractals from the tip of Shelley’s tongue,

with Whitman's teardrops, Attic dust from Keats's urn.

O terrible cathedral of similes, those crystal arches of death,

curve-yearning to kiss the one Platonic asymptote of beauty.

Gone, Gone beyond, Bodhi Svaha, O vanished Jack.

O mad pretender of Zen, embodied shaman spell, now only

an unpunctuated rain of ash descending among cedars

on a Cascade trail to Desolation Peak, over the Salish Sea...

 

Friend, here's the truth about your radiance:

If you want to turn the Spirit green, you'll have to thrust

your sunbeams through the belly of an earthworm.



This incantation will be published in my new book,
"The Nectar Of This Breath," Winter, 2022.