Pome On Dr Sax & The Moon

Dr Sax the master knower of
Easter was now reduced to penury
and looking at Stained glass windows
in old churches-His only 2
last friends in life, this impossibly
hard life no matter under what
conditions it appears, where Bela
Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who visited
him annually in his room on 3rd Street
and cut thru the fogs of evening with
their heads bent as the bells of St Simon
tolled a heartbroken "Kathleen" across
the rooftops of old hotels where similar old
men like Doctor Sax sat bent headed
on beds of woe with prayerbeads between
their feet, Oh moaning, homes for
lost pigeons or time's immemorial
white dove
of the roses
of the unborn
astonished bliss-

And there they'd sit in the little
room,Sax on the edge of the bed with a
bottle of rotgut Tokay in his hand, Bela
in the rocking chair, Boris standing by
the sink---
and then Sax wd always say

"Please play the monster for me" and of course
the old actors, who loved him dearly and came to
see him for human tender sentimentality not
monstrous reasons protested but he always
got drunk and cried so that Boris first had
to get up and extend his arms do
Frankenstein go uck! then Bela
wd stand and arm cape and leer and
approach Sax, who squealed

Excerpt from Pome on Doctor Sax (1961)





The moon her magic be, big sad face
Of infinity An illuminated clay ball
Manifesting many gentlemanly remarks

She kicks a star, clouds foregather
In Scimitar shape, to round her
Cradle out, upsidedown any old time

You can also let the moon fool you
With imaginary orange-balls
Of blazing imaginary light in fright

As eyeballs, hurt and foregather,
Wink to the wince of the seeing
Of a little sprightly otay

Which projects spikes of light
Out the round smooth blue balloon
Ball full of mountains and moons

Deep as the ocean, high as the moon,
Low as the lowliest river lagoon
Fish in the Tar and pull in the Spar

Billy de Bud and the Hanshan Emperor
And all wall moongazers since
Daniel Machree, Yeats see

Gaze at the moon ocean marking
the face-

In some cases

The moon is you

In any case

The moon

~ Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

four quartets

"What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from."
(T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets)

The Mind Is Its Own Beautiful Prisoner

the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mind looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings

then decently hanged himself,one afternoon.

The last thing he saw was you
naked amid unnaked things,

your flesh,a succinct wandlike animal,
a little strolling with the futile purr
of blood;your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue
chalking itself,as not to make an error,
with twists spontaneously methodical.
He suddenly tasted worms windows and roses

he laughed,and closed his eyes as a girl closes
her left hand upon a mirror.

- E. E. Cummings (1894—1962)

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.


I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

By Edgar Allan Poe