Friday, March 16, 2018

(entièrement de ne pas entre nous)

Sometimes, not often, I’ve said this before but this time i really mean it. Ya gotta watch - listen to the vid. It really comes alive when you hear it.



(entièrement de ne pas entre nous)
.
Thanks but I won’t be attending. 
I’m afraid I can’t, at the brink of the age of 67, 
find much interest or purpose in what amounts for me 
to paying transmogrified homage to having navigated 
.
the fleet blur of four years of late adolescence near 50 
years ago (with people I now mostly barely
recall) to jump, as if I couldn't 
imagine anything more fun to do,
into a tug of war with other ‘classes’ 
(encouraged to behave like competing 
intramural teams) similarly engaged 
in what for the college is surely 
the motive force: to see what 
clutch of alumni donates the most dollar signs
to it. I don’t begrudge them this. Colleges
need lots of dough. And I’m graced
.
with the riches of unfathomed bliss
of a life in New York, skidding thrillingly
over the thinnest thin surfaces of a “fixed income” –

so fixed it has rendered me cleanly unable
to fit any niche which depended on
spending more than would
procure me a split,
grilled kielbasa, boiled sour-
cream-dabbed pierogi, Ukrainian
sauerkraut (misnomered: it’s a bit sweet)
at Odessa (at 7th street, Avenue A). In the odd way 

I register lessons from life, though, I have to confess
that the high-handed forced shrill-toned snark which
slits under and into these over-wrought lines –
.
(oh do beware markedly visual strict-driven
grids clamped on "writing":  as deadly
a march through the desert as college P.R.) –
.  
bear the un-pretty tracks of defense scared of threat.
It resides in the fact I suspect I must here to the point
now espouse - I don’t like Christmas for just the same
.
reason I dislike the press of a college besieging us all
to love it. They're for people who barbecue chicken 
and make love to those of the Alien Sex. 
People with children.
.
I neither barbecue nor much like to fuck, but 
I very much warm to, indeed am by rep held 
by those with legitimate claims to a firsthand 
experience, as a candidate rather more likely
than not to be placed at the head (the word
pointedly used) of the queue of things having
to do with the come-hither faux-pouty moue 
.
of the Mouth. 
From here it goes South –
.
as shall I go mid-May, 
for a scatter of days, far away 
from collegiate maneuvers,
august weights and measures –
to quite other pleasures: 
.
to go,
oh to go! 
go to, oh! - 
Mexico.
.
where what I will do
my sly eye apperceives
(entièrement de ne pas
entre nous)
.
I won’t tell anyone (not even vous
nor even the who whom I'll be apperceiving -
and who anyway needs no apprising of any 
uprising, re-sizing, down-sizing or moue.
.
“Yo!
People don’t speak French in Mexico, Joe.
You forgot to learn Spanish, you twit.”
(Oh, shit.)




.

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