Aug 24 2007
Kerouac by Kirpal Gordon
Contribution sent for the installation Memory Babe :
Contribution envoyée pour l’installation Memory Babe :
Blue Jack, Blue Rilke
by Kirpal Gordon
Friends of Jack:
Here’s a blues I will be performing on 5 Sep, Howl Festival, Bowery Poetry
Club—
enjoy, love & remember—
Kirpal Gordon
Blue Jack, Blue Rilke
Rilke turned his lust to stone, stone to blood, blood to bone, bone to
rub our affliction to fire, to pen the peep of wonder at death’s crazy bid:
Rose, o pure contradiction, desire / To be no one’s sleep under so many / Lids.
When Kerouac scat in prose what Rilke wrote his epitaph toward, sacred
slits slid open & birth marked the bloody cost revealing why heart & hymen get
broken for tender’s the wound insisting us human & the salve that heals touches
lips to fingertips’ feel. We’ve seen the shapes rage takes against the
flicker of the flame: bombs drop, blood flows, bones break. Calm lakes reflect
what every face already knows: lines drawn can never be erased.
To move, any blues song will tell ya, you got to move, mother. To
where’s what all the trouble’s about, invading or avoiding another. Accept loss
forever Kerouac riffed, remained open & not blew it, Hamiet, ripping out habit to
tear free the callous that keeps our corazon contorted for we’re adrift
within premonitions we can never fully intuit. If bereft that lust is life &
desire direction, then remember roadmarks are only all we’ve left.
To slide from loss to lost, let’s wander the garden looking for the rose
whose folds Rilke hid our real identity in—spinal-chorded stem-seed housed
in a cranium of brains the way the heart remains a chamber of knot &
bloom—nothing but the wings of desire, a shape we might yet be born into.
Blues performed on 5 Sep, Howl Festival, Bowery Poetry Club
© Kirpal Gordon
