Dispatched From The Lounge #3

I'd like to start this dispatch by commemorating my personal hero and idol, Lawrence Ferlighetti, who turns 87 today. Ferlinghetti recently advised an interviewer to be ready for when the electricity goes out, and that now may be the time to stock up on pot cookies. Sage advice indeed. I saw the man once (in physical form, though I've seen him in my mind a million times), and simply lost my voice as he walked by en route to his office through the poetry room at City Lights. I'll never forget what it was like to be in the presence of Him, truly with the capital H. I didn't know then what to say, and wouldn't know now. All that comes to mind is 'thank you'. I recommend "A Coney Island of the Mind" for everyone, and if you've already read it, read it again. It's a true portrait of a (the) human condition.

Inspired by Ferlinghetti, as always, I'm starting to think about doing some translations of Italian poetry.

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The difference between sanity and schizophrenia is self-awareness.

Remember, you know something that no one else does. It may be a deep secret, something that happened, it may be a way of looking at the world, it may be a connection you've seen and never told anyone about. You, and everyone else, knows one or many things that nobody else knows. That knowledge is always in your eyes, but does anyone else ever see it?

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Enough amateur philosophizing. On to the main event. The first poem came from a chance meeting last week. The second one was written exactly two years earlier, and started off a journal that I just filled up last week and I don't understand it the way I must have when I wrote it. I always get the insatiable urge to fry in the desert this time of year.
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3/23/2006

Good afternoon, miss. This is my card.
Yes, I'm in the destruction business.
The mind-blowing business, that is.
I sneak into your little hidden homes all
over the towns and cities and forests
of this world and worlds like it,
and I set off explosives in your walls,
and I run away wild as you realize
what's starting to happen.
No, it certainly doesn't pay much. In fact,
like any business, it's been tough
to get it started,
and you end up doing the first handful
for free anyhow
But I'm in this for the long haul.
It could be quite profitable, once
I've done enough of them,
you'll all be running around happy naked
singing forgetting you lived in those death-traps
and who'll need your movies, who'll need
internet and television and the rest of the
mind-junk you eat and vomit today,
when you'll be so exposed amused by
each other, by the millions of
mysteries everyone secretly unknowingly shares,
and while you won't find any true answers,
you'll pay me again and again
with more questions.

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3/23/2004

Vegas

Las Vegas is the beautifully disgusting
heartcenter of whatever there exists
of 21st century American art
as it is only in the commercial
absurdity where excess has destroyed
the decaying mind that the true
center can shine through in all
its depraved unnatural misguided
sensation as only in Las Vegas
does the person cease to be
and only in Las Vegas does
the universal guilt ignore itself
in a microcosm of excitement pretended
sin and it is here that we
so love and loathe ourselves
and what we dream of never becoming
that all that is human can once
again thaw like iced cave
paintings and fossils of those
before us who know much more
than we ever will.

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Free your mind, as in free beer and freedom.

I lie. This isn't from the lounge today. Conceived there, born elsewhere in Portland.

And welcome to any new passengers on this ride. Those of you who'd like, feel free to throw open the exit door here at cruising altitude and step out quietly. I'll tell the pilot, if he ever comes aboard.