Hold Your Shield, Front Guard

Now it's time to commence into the world

Really try to win that girl

See if you can just get by

Busking trying to do or die

To live the dream or the old lie

Wishing the trains would still run

The sunflowers would burning come

Down the long lost vagrant tracks

The canneries not looking back

And I find myself feeling fair

Though I'm going god knows where

I turn and see a smokestack there

Find that I'm in Adair

Walking miles and unaware

So I sit down on some rocky chair

A fragment of an old bunk house

And try not to mind the flitting grouse

Wondering who will be my spouse

Casting nets like Jesus to a metaphor sea

Admittedly as weak as me

But I need the hike,

Like we still like Ike

To tell us about the Military Industrial Complex

Though he never told us what came next

How to break out of that mold

Turn the shit back into gold

The real alchemical feat,

Or how to hem a skirt,

Or how to sweep women off their feet

And retire to Gettysburg

To paint pretty pictures until our death

No, we need now some strong stance

As we draw in our breaths

And try to find some kind

Of line inside our withering minds

A straight way to the gate of the divine

Reconnected, never mind the niche

That says it's all keen, so eat a peach

And we might as well careen

On a bender, blender, our machines

Hearts of a newer part

Where are we now?

And where is art?

 

(This is the key theme of my piece:

So I'll sum it quick, and let it cease,

So you can return to your bland times

And I can compose other hurt rhymes

You'll find in bad taste

With cum and cunt and whore misplaced

And turned, in the next trick,

To the loser with the smallest dick

All for a laugh

And if you front me enough

To get her hooked on all that stuff,

My friend, I'll give you half.)

 

Well, when last we left our hero

He was back at basic zero

Ripped up and out and fart apart

And no one gave a single fart

Not that you might catch the drift

And if you, why it's a gift

To see that while the culture's dumbing

Some people still know when a word is cumming

So they tore down the academies

And made a mockery in the Louvre

And fashioned fragments

Into separate planets

But what did these Waste Lands prove?

 

That we can take a bit of this

And yet a bit of that

Or as some aging rocker said

There's more than one way to skin the cat.

But when can we feel the burn

That makes us always ever yearn

To re-fashion and make it new

And then, in making something true,

Really let this thing come true?

I said that I would be brief—

I am, as a plotting widow's grief

While eyeing her own son

The next hand job to be done

To send him so far away

In a mental hospital to stay

Where we've left the soul

That once infested Rock and Roll,

Jazz, and Blues,

And even sometimes the Daily News.

But how can we recover that sprite

That makes the summer seem so light

And helps guide the winter time aright?

All these questions and more

Pour in through the door

And I find them stained to my kitchen floor

Masturbating at three a.m.

And when the sun rises? What then?

Should I continue to gratify

My ego without knowing why

And take my cock hard in hand

And squirt the juice into a can

Where I pretend to Burroughs be

Or Kerouac, or Bukowsky

Or any other pretentious prick!

I'd rather let Ignatz throw the brick!

 

And here is my idle theme

But it's a nightmare and no dream

And it will not yield!

We must destroy no more

But pick up the shield

And sure, re-forge again and again

The same old common refrains

But by our vary style by new

And to our own selves be true

And finally dance, like puppets:

We should be Vaudeville,

A thousand thrill,

Create to kill—

We Literary Muppets.