(if you wanna subtitle it: if he’s up and out tonight he must be truly down)
One more time–half a time–regarding the rabbithole distraction that is Warren, and at the same time is the rabbithole distraction that consists of conducting familial relationships almost 100% exclusively via those god damnable pocket computers everyone is so proud to own and be leashed unto, at least proud if their ear tag tracking beacons are branded like so many cattle by the place where that one young man and his betrothed are Prospering so.
‘Cause cheap is how I feel, and I just can’t-want to hear them failing+failing to scream, neither
‘Cause we have real business to attend to and fish that matter, to be poaching from that little river, and I sure as hell am not talking about the Politics that seem to be so paradoxically very legal, now I’m gone, to discussing in that place of Don’t want Nothing to do
with you. Not politics. No. Poetics.
All the rest
is nothing more than staring
into my empty coffee cup,
thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lyin’ …
that if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics n’ statistics say it will, I predict right here and now–write it the fuck down–this motel will still be standing
Until I pay my bill.
May heaven help the one who leaves.
I’m not going line by line this time. Instead, all I really want to notice is how he quotes other poets repeatedly, incessantly, all through this one. (I’m sure this list is far from comprehensive and that I’m missing many more.)
–the Eagles, most obviously
–Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927, especially in the opening phrases
–and toward the end, somebody else’s favorite song, the specific somebody in this case being Good Honest Abe himself:
Away down south in the land of traitors,
Rattlesnakes and alligators,
Ride away, ride away, ride away, ride away.
Where cotton’s king and men are chattels,
Union boys will win the battles,
Ride away, ride away, ride away,
Dixieland
@okamaman7324
5 months ago
Warren is my spirit animal.
Anyone who has ever sat somewhere not leaving ’cause anywhere else is just worse.
Is my brother.
Kin I git an Amen. Anyone who’s ever had a heart. Or more to the point, anyone who’s ever worked hard to keep it beating in time with the one real god, and not the Injections of lying hate lying around so conveniently, so coincidentally oh yes I’m sure.
Are you, after all and really, waiting for Jimmy down in the alley; waiting there for him to come back home? Or–I say it and I ask it with trembling hope–at the very least Waiting down on the corner and thinking of ways to get your own self back to your own?
-30-
***
Now finally we can shake free of the muck (The Congregation Splits)
Wipe the slate
go on back ten days into the past before the Fall
when he wrote it on the pure white gray wall (Give A Fuck!);
when it was still summer.
***
I know that you love me and want all the best for me, and especially for me to get Well Again so I can finally have a happy, and productive, and … adjusted Life.
Johnny Caveman, pour les grottes, down in the alley, and …
They had all been warned, and the (pure whitegray) walls came down.
Never ever be that horse; it’s not in your
Interests. Yes. That is, where we Were, that one place
where the blacktop ran over the top of the river of thirst and drinking,
toppa the fish, in water of the river
not seeing it because it is the liquid air in which they live every moment of life.
(Whether or not you don’t-treated Margo right, Time itself has been Kind, to the demeanor she wears, this Margo.)
That’ll be as far back as I can reach
on the night before the night before it freezes.