Coffee Cup Complaint

[marc]

— for the dharma bums,
hanging out beneath broken down bridges


I want to rant like a oversexed rooster, staggering toward
some decadent hen house full of skeletal politicians,
I want to blow out the pilot light on the stove
in White Houses that compose songs about burning
wheatfields and magnifying glasses that inspect
the lovers in every bedroom in America.

Get the hell out of our bucket of tears will you,
for Christ’s sake, release the scaffold you’ve got
draped around our unfulfilled mysteries
and archbishoped medicine cabinets full
of broken dreams.

Oh you cancered catastrophic conundrum of drop dead
open window blues, I blow my continental harmonica
up your swollen ass and blind your insightful eyes
with shooting stars and the poetry
of Charles Bukowski.

I have heard an ode of blistering plutonium,
have met Kurt Cobain inside the hidden doors
of his trembling sensitivity, watched as you battered
him senseless because he would not conform
to your biblical pablum and water fountain
of supposed normality.

Like a cockroach inside the guesthouse
of a magnesium monotony
you bleed with the retired blood
of a 1940's radio station, offering nothing but
the same old static and untuned guitar chords
of a toilet bowl that flushes the remnants
of your pretentious bombs down the drain.

I traded in my new testament for a used copy
of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, I stripped myself naked
on a Kerouacian highway and ran screaming past
the sunflowers, chanting something about
the berries of a forgotten wisdom,
waving a Tibetan prayer flag from the portal
of my eyes.

And as the amphetamine parade marches on the legs
of expiring diplomats, as the molesting ministers
are unrepentant outside native sweat lodges,
as Hieronymus Bosch repaints his garden
of delights, I collect the crushed flowers
of our history and place them in an envelope
marked FOR GOD’S SAKE, RETURN TO SENDER.

So you skeletons peering through my window,
you purpled and bruised excuses of humanity,
get thee back inside the abstract abyss
where you belong, where mirrors of spiritual earthquake
will haunt you forever and let me get on
with the railroad truths spoken by the hobos
of yesterday when freedom was as simple
as a meal around campfire
and there were no epilogues
of confining grief

in our coffee cups.