Alan Kaufman’s poetry
reveals to me the idols
of this twilight culture, white vultures
screaming of pain, not theirs, tearing
away at corpses left rotting on a battleground
they refuse to participate in
Oh, that’s the aesthetic: white dreads
for Mother Earth, comfort in mushrooms
for discovery of celestial patterns and blown-up brains,
colors creeping through the cracked walls of the commune
ignore the infestations we live in
He told me,
as he was tripping:
“We must suck at the great mother’s breast, the great magnet,”
like leeches, he preaches:
”Everyone is confused except for me. I’m
not confused,” he tells me
that he needs four hours to collect his mind
in the mornings over illegal EBT cigarettes,
yet in his hippity-hop journey, he tells me:
“I gave a gift to you. Did you get it?”
I strain to receive,
lying awake at night,
listening to the throbbing of fifty-three dreams,
all the molecules pumping through so many veins.
How many veins?
I am a foreigner here.
Alan Kaufman explains white poverty,
punks and garbage bag ladies
he steals money from,
calls them racist metaphors, condemns them dead
while they are holding his hand.
How he rages
against policemen in peaceful towns,
takes the outcast voice
(they all do)
the poverty, the weirdness
piercings that penetrate the social fabrics
we were born with, woven into our
skin with our DNA, we dye them away -
Alan Kaufman knows.
But I am an immigrant, a hipster poser,
a stranger in a surreal land,
privileged enough to know my Norton verse and
traveled enough to know what is worse
than America is a lot of other countries,
governments maybe -
but is Anarchy safe?
Across the wall, the sleeping man is my subconscious eye,
all night, I perform for him (he doesn’t know)
how I endow my voice, my moans
with meaning for him alone.
While “my boyfriend” drools on pillows, three at once – I am incapable of loyalty,
he lies there beside me after a day of
what? nothing. He writes and listens to music
loudly. He is talented. I don’t want to constrain him.
YELLING:
I don’t know! When! I got stuck! In this stupid! Hippie cliche!
Looking around me! Is this a Joke! I don’t recognize! My race.
I am not Kaufman
I am not angry
I am not political enough
except when my mouth is dry and I need
borrowed tears to cry, which
is rare, because I have my own
I will not preach you
my vegan goodness. For
we are all trapped like flies here
in amber, sweet ego, not
a tool or a lens, not special
but congealing.
As we believe we are flying, even though
all the world is already frozen.
I am not one of them. I can not be.
I act damn Capitalist.
I collect books I never finish reading.
I scheme celebrity status, confess
that even the sale of my body
can be sold – I have been told, before I
grow old I want to burn through the cold
world with the lamest poetry I can sell
But I am frozen,
amber never drips
above the horizon of the weavings in ancient patterns,
Universal deceptions that
sail away into forgotten dreams, Bohemian
and the dingy basements of abused brains, mine
sleepless and failed
impatient to make my abstractions real
