THE F?!&ING POET (Rainbow in the Smoke)

My name is Richard. Dick. Dickie. I’m a poet. I’m a fucking poet. I’m just a fucking poet for Christ’s sake!

You know, smoking is a sacred business. The Indians used to smoke, the Apaches, the Apaloooshies, in Africa, in South America, the witch-doctors, the shamans, they used to smoke to understand the meaning of life, they smoked to get high, to reconnect their fingertips with their lungs, recycle their breath and pollinate the atmosphere with the spirit of their smoke, which has now witnessed the inner workings of man and can testify without fear of contradiction to the sanctity of our corruption, and the wisdom of fanning our fires and accepting their smokes…

Look, see, see the rainbow in the smoke, through the smoke? That’s not pollution, it’s not black death, it’s yearning, rainbow yearning, a romance with having to do what a man has to do, needing to see what a man needs to see.. I need to see the rainbow in the smoke, not in the sky, I’m an urban dreamer, a modern man, a city shaman, I conjure up hope where there is no hope, hygiene where there is only raw sewage, I inhale the modern lie and I breathe out the eternal truth : that society has always been a dirty business, and no sooner will you come to terms with it than it will leave you lurching alone in the shadows of your own loss! But uit was real, it wasn’t an illusion…Or was it? is it? It’s gone, the rainbow in my smoke…I must have been mistaken. Still, we can always repeat our mistakes…

I never used to smoke. I never used to drink, or eat junk-food. I used to work in a health-food store, I used to be a hippie. I used to meditate and do yoga, eat raw foods, I was a vegetarian, alfalfa-sprouts, drink juices, carrot-juice, wheatgrass juice.. I used to fast once a month for the new moon. Take massage classes, creative visualization workshops, go to nuclear freeze benefits. Before everybody decided it was less likely this world would be blown up than it would simply suffocate in its’ own shit. A sudden explosive death began to seem like an escapist fantasy, now the reality is this slow agonizingly conscious consumption of the collective lung, gangrene of the soul. I used to believe that if the worst came to the worst all the clean and gentle brothers and sisters would simply evacuate to the woods, the mountains or the ocean and build things new, living things that were as old as the hills, leave the city to its’ rats!

Now I don’t believe it will happen like that, this world’s gone too far, we’re all in this dirty too deep, and I can’t separate myself from the sewage, it’s as much mine as anybody’s, I’m as hopeless as the next man…Unless, unless I can learn to understand it, from the inside out, appreciate it, maybe even love it, this unholy fucking mess that nobody will ever really clean up.. Cause somehow, for some god-forsaken reason known only to my own gangrenous soul it seems more real than simple evacuation…

So has anybody got any cookies? I nean, real cookies, none of this whole-wheat and molasses shit! Give me some white sugar and lard and preservatives! Could I at least have a cookie before I choke to death? I mean, carrots and grass are for fucking horses, I wasn’t born for fucking horses, I’m a man, I need some man-food, so has anybody got any cookies!? I’ve had a tough day, a tough manly day.. It’s not easy getting out of bed at four’ o ’clock in the afternoon on an empty stomach! I’m a poet, I’m a fucking poet, that’s how fucking poet’s live, not fucking horses! I am composing my being into art, it takes a fucking lifetime! At the moment I’m studying my nightmares…

It’s a shame about The Bomb. I liked The Bomb. I love The Bomb. I was used to The Bomb. I was brought up on bombs. My dad was bombed in The War. After that my mom was always bombed. I was seven when I first bombed in school and I’ve been bombing ever since! Without bombs I just fall to pieces, may as well be in bird-land without bombs, if we can’t get bombed every once in a while, life would be boring without bombs, we need to have bombs, it’s bombs not bread gives meaning to life, bread just keeps us alive! Give me bombs or die, for Christ’s sake don’t let ‘em take my bombs away!!!!

Well, can anybody lend me five dollars so I can go buy some cookies? Maybe some smokes, a coupla’ beers? I mean, it’s not like I need a house or a car or even a refrigerator.. So don’t tell me to go get a job, I already have a job, doesn’t pay too much but I don’t work for money, I work for love, love of bombs, it’s just the way I am, self-destructive, a bit like Jesus! So can anybody give me five dollars? How much do you think this world is worth, billions and billions and trillions of fucking dollars! Some individuals are worth billions and trillions of dollars, others merely millionaires… And don’t try telling me they earned it, they didn’t earn it, not by the sweat of their wrinkles, alarm-clocks at the crack of Christmas, mud and bullets, or some hyper-fucking-fascist foreman up your ass every weak of the day! what they earn is cream on their cakes, icing on their bundles…Most of ‘em brought up rich, able to pick and choose, you know what it means being able to pick and choose? The only thing people like me ever got to pick and choose was my nose and my fingernails! These rich kids, most of ‘em raised to inherit the wind! So let ‘em fart a bit o’ debris in my face every now and then! I mean, what are they saving it for, a rainy day> It’s fucking pissing down outside!! And these rich white livberals who need to work to ease their charitable complexes, they love it, they choose it, they fucking pick it! They worship the working-stiff, the noble savage, the peasant they never were are or ever will be by socio-economic circumstance! Well, I don’t. It’s too close to my bone, and not my funny-bone, the bone that’s too close to choking me to death or committing me to wage-slavery! I need not to work. I need to stay pure fopr my art, my fucking Art is my work, and I don’t have the time or the energy or the will to work at anything else! there’s enough fucking money out there for everybody, you know it as well as I do, you know what I’m saying is true, and you also know it’s bullshit, but the bullshit is real, man, so give me some money you bourgeois fucking ass-holes! Would you condemn me to being yet another figment of man’s lack of imagination? Shit, if it wasn’t for working-class bums and fucking poets like me, we may as well all just eat puke and die!! This is revolution we’re talking here, we’re not talking history-books, we are talking PRESENT FUCKING TENSION FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS!!!! What’s five fucking dollars between friends? Nothing if it’s given freely… OK, keep your fucking money, I’ll just starve to death and make the fucking romance real!

Did I ever show you my scar? The one I got working in the circus. You didn’t know I worked in the circus, did you? On the trapeze. I have a photograph in my wallet, not of the scar, of me working in the circus, on the trapeze, before I fell off the trapeze and scarred myself for life. I’ll show you in the bathroom later. Not the scar, the photograph, I’ll show you the scar now if you like, would anyone care to witness my poor wounded buttock, kiss my ass!!!???

I’m a poet, I’m a fucking poet! I’m not a revolutionary. Revolution is for pricks who think they can piss water. Poetry is for ass-holes who refuse to shit bull, I say nothing I don’t feel, even though sometimes I feel it would be better to say nothing, but then I wouldn’t be a poet I’d be a Zen monk! I don’t aspire to being a Zen monk, I’m a poet, I aspire to being heard, so is anybody fucking listening!!???? Don’t you ever sometimes feel we should all be a bit closer? I mean, without being un-natural, don’t you ever sometimes feel after all these years together we should be able to look each other in the eyes and not feel like we’re eye-balling the man in the fucking moon!?

My name is Richard. Dick. Dickie. That’s what my mom called me. She knew what my name was.

We were out on the pier one night, drinking blackberry-brandy. I was saying how we should go out West, visit my brother, she said she liked that idea but she didn’t think it would happen. Then we did it, as the sun set, we did it…She got so cold her lips turned blue. Then the boittle fell in the water. she wanted me to dive in after it, but it was too cold, the current was too strong. She said we could have at least left a message in there, but we didn’t, there was no message, just an empty blackberry-brandy bottle floating out to sea. And she couldn’t stop shaking all the way home…

It’s just a dream, it’s just a fucking dream. Time doesn’t make it any more real, so it’s a long fucking dream! It never changes, this dream-world, it does and it doesn’t, we just get deeper and deeper and deeper into the same shit…I do. But aren’t I in this fucking world? But you’re not the whole fucking world! or am I? The fuck I am! If I die there’s nothing left, one out all out! remember the Alamo? remember the fucking Alamo!? That was the end of the world, man. We lost, we went to fucking heaven but we lost the world! And what good is heaven without a world to blame it on, or thank it for? Like a dream without ever waking up…Nothing’s changed. So you eat brown bread instead of white bread.. We’re all still stuck in the same shit! I am! me, me, me!!! Who else am I supposed to talk about? How else am I supposed to know how this world feels? Nobody fucking tells me. All they tell me is “take care of yourself!” “Use Chlorox!: “Eat tofu!” “Win the lottery and you’ll be OK, man!” “Think yourself lucky, at this very moment some poor black bastard is probably still getting his balls burned off in some Mississippi jail! But don’t feel bad cause the fucker would do the same to you if the shoe was on the other foot!” Which fucking foot are you on anyway? How the fuck do I know??? Aren’t we all in this fucking feet first feast together, best fuck forward??? Well, are we or aren’t we????

I’m a poet, I’m a fucking poet! You don’t have to recite poetry to be a poet, just be alive and not dead on your fucking feet!!!

Anyway, after my mother killed herself, I went out West to visit my brother, ask him why he never came to the funeral. This was when I worked in the health-food-store. I met this nineteen-year-old girl, she was a hippie. I would have followed her to the ends of the earth just for a sniff of her hand-woven ankle-bracelet. We finished up living in the woods with the rainbow-people. Long hair, fucking tie-dyes, salutations to the fucking sun, the lot, man! out in the boonies twiddling my dickie with this waspy-waisted would-be Indian maiden who wouldn’t even let me touch her if the moon was in the wrong quarter, know what I mean, clean and gentle brothers and sisters!!?? I was OUT THERE witnessing the organisms at work, grooving on the inner mushroom-clouds, hugging that pot o’ Colombian Gold in the rainbow’s armpit…And doing nothing…Spent a whole fucking month trying to do nothing, meditating, raw foods, spewing my brains up trying to recover that eternal nothingness… And I found it, my Christ I found it and it was NOTHING when she left, dumped me for some heavy-metal Jimi Hendrix dude in a Suburu pick-up…Left me barely surviving on Nothing! I had to find something quick before I turned into a raw vegetable! So I hitched a ride back into the city, hustled enough green-bread to buy me some smokes, a bag of cookies and a six-pack of Coors Enlightenment! And I haven’t looked inward since…

We’ve gone too far, this world’s gone too far to aim back to nothing. We have to bear witness to the crap we’ve created. One man’s nirvana on top of a mountain means nothing to that poor black bastard getting his balls burned off…I mean, what’s the fucking point, I ask you???? And you wonder why I despise myself, and everybody else. Cause we allow it to happen. Don’t know how to fucking stop it. We are so fucking helpless. Cause we’re scared. We are so fucking scared and so fucking helpless! And I am so sick to death of being so scared and helplessly responsible for this scared and helpless world that just won’t let everybody live in fucking peace!!!

My name is Richard. Dick. Dickie. That’s what my mom wrote on the note she left : “Dear Dickie, take care of yourself, mom.” Not even any “love”. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to figure out what I would say to somebody "I’d brought into this world that I personally thought was a big pile of crap I couldn’t wait to be rid of!? I don’t know what “love” is. “Love is what you make it!” Sounds like a piece of fucking cake!

I’m a poet. I’m a fucking poet! never read poetry anymore. never read books, or newspapers… My life has sufficient sub-text. I no longer have the time or the energy to read between somebody else’s lines…

The only thing you know for sure about “the news” is that it is not telling you the whole truth. Keep up with the world? If we really did we’d all be silicone-chips or dead Arabs by now…

Somebody gave me this newspaper-clipping. A local arts critic. You know what he called me? “Virulent”. “Deluded”. “Sophomoric”. “A witless would-be political mish-mash of over-wrought over-dressed irresponsible verbiage!”
“Grape-minded”. “Grape-minded”? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Is he insinuating I was drunk? I was drunk. But I was also politically correct, he doesn’t mention that. I guess he doesn’t share my politics. I guess I don’t share his bank-balance! here we go again, money, money, money…If someone doesn’t agree with me it must be because they’re rich! How many working-class schmucks do you know go around calling p[eople “virulent” and “sophomoric”? I can smell that bourgeois critical faculty several ghettoes away, down Ronan Drive, up Burnham Hill, where the martinis live and the Porsches Porsche and the maids are made to measure! They’re scared of me, the righteousness of my anger! Even though I personally am sick to death of my anger, there’s no fucking end to it! But how do I let it go? That’s what they want me to do! How much humiliation should a body take!!??? As much as it needs to heal itself? Thus spake Pie-Icharus, the mathematical banana! Mere skin doth not a fruit make! I guess my ideals are out-of-date, but I don’t give a fucking fig! It is still THEM and US, the RICH and the POOR, in capitalistic letters, black and white.. Truth is black and white, justice is black and white! I’m as bigoted as they are! In the ultimate light of the cosmos, color is a mere distraction. Anybody can be colorful. Color is destined for oblivion,. Jesus didn’t stroll around in fucking tie-dyes! Black and white! Extremism, discovering dogma is the only way to enlightenment, ask Siddharta! Who the fuck is Sid Arta? Frank Siddharta, he’s a dead fucking Arab!!!

It makes me puke…If you’ve got an inkling of insight, a scrap of talent, you try to get it out, the teachers tell you at school when you’re a kid, try and express what you’d really like to be and do…Till you’re old enough to do it, then they tell you to put it away again, or they’ll tell you you can’t do it like that, or they’ll tell you it’s just NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Some hundred-percent cotton-printed smart-ass will tell you you’re not worth the paper you’ll never be published on! And the trouble is, the tragedy is, being a poet, you know it’s not good enough, nothing is good enough, not even enough is enough is GOOD ENOUGH!!! But still you’re doing your best. What the fuck do you do once you’ve done your best? You do it again, but you do it better!!! What the fuck do you know, you don’t even know who Frank Siddharta is! He’s a dead fucking Arab! And I know who killed him!!!!

I’m a poet, I’m a fucking poet! The people are lining up outside, all the way from here to Walmarts, the crowds are throbbing, is it me they want to see or is it Arnold Bacon-egger? Either way humanity is on-line flocking fucking clawing each other’s feces out to get a glimpse of their specious…My mom would’ve been proud! If she were not so dead…

I had this beautiful dream the other night, I dreamed I was floating on a log in the middle of a beautiful lake, when this beautiful woman floating on a raft floats past, and as she floats past I realize she is having this beautiful dream that she’s floating on a raft in the middle of a beautiful lake when this beautiful man floating on a log floats past…And as I float past I realize I’m dreaming…I wake up…and my poor dead drunk mother is singing “Me and My Shadow”… It was her favorite song. It was undoubtedly playing when she first met my father, she loved my dad, but now he died, blown up in the war…and her poor wounded love was allowed to live on…”strolling down the avenue”… Don’t abandon me now, mom, now I’m about to become rich and famous, so I can be part of my solution not everybody else’s problem…Cause I am sick to death of everybody else’s problem…and I’m sick to vomiting of everybody else’s solution, it’s not a solution at all, not for me anyway, it is a maze made out of jello…and it is sickening! But if you can’t sicken ‘em, join ‘em! And when it’s twelve ‘o’ clock I climb the stairs, I never knock, cause nobody’s there…Just me and my shadow…all alone and feeling…

I don’t have a brother. My brother lives farther West than I’ll ever reach. He doesn’t need me. I don’t need him. We may as well be dead

**** Transcription of my first extended performance monologue.