An old Marx Brothers poem - rededicated to TranquilityBase

[rowens]

I've reposted ten years ago and older poems to this site recently, that are already on this site. Elaborating on references. I had a poem of fever dreams, where I couldn't stop making jokes every moment of all eternity: and shouted out I am Groucho Marx in Hell.
And I had a trope of Groucho Marx's demise, and figure it with Semicircle's essay of Altheimer's. 
Carrying my notebooks through the rain to the nearest well-functioning wifi is an assorted sense of adventure in the meantime of others. Like something out  of the Lord of the Rings.
  
This, TB, is Groucho speaking out of that Limbo



Lethe


Brother, silent one always dancing,
Sending the blonde girls into hysteria,
You chase that color right out of the rainbow.
And, boy, were the noons ever warm.

What is your harp doing now? Is it
Rusting, shoveling the dust hoveled in the big-spenders
Electronic bay, wisped away by this Mechanized America.

Your funny dreams, that old country.
Is Leonard still playing cards with Satan?
I never died, I never died,―my madness.

I've seen many shores.
All I know is, I know nothing.
You know that's my creed, brother?
Or, maybe, the time has come the Walrus said.

I cannot imagine that you were ever unhappy.
But we are clowns, brother.
And I still am.
I've never died.

[TranquillityBase]

Thank you.

Like the stanzas about Harpo and Chico the best.  For some reason the last two stanzas make me sad, or maybe it's the idea of Groucho in Hell.  I think even in Heaven he'd still be unable to stop making jokes.  But maybe that's why he's in Hell, or at least condemned to Limbo.  I see Heaven as a pretty humorless place.

[rowens]

This, like everything with me, is part of a series in a book. It was called Opal, and I wrote it in spring of 2007.

I've since reworked some of the poems and have them saved as standalone ones.

There was a theme of reincarnation. Opal reflecting many colors. Many individual lives.
There was a series of bodies, Groucho Marx's strong wit mixed with the idea of going senile, such a mind losing its wit, was a theme in the book.
I used years, and ideas of the wiccan and other things' idea of Summerland, the place the soul rests before reincarnation, to finding fitting Figures to compare and be the new lives of. I had Groucho leave his body and inhabit Philip Dick, as explanation of Dick's "madness" at that time. So I have Philip Dick possessed by Groucho Marx poems. Finding synchronicities in their lives and works, and weaving a poetic texture out of it all.
I was born to the day that, according to the numbers I was using, someone would be reincarnated as Philip Dick, based on the day he died.
So then I begin speaking as myself, having come aware of all the former lives I've had.

I don't know if that sounds interesting to others. But it did to me at the time. And I went full into it.

And Dick's obsession with his twin sister added to my recurring theme of the love of one's Double. 

I'm giving so much supplement paragraphs on my poems lately, because I've been weaving these things together for so long, standalone poems are going to make less and less sense. 

In my mythos, all possible contexts overlap. Hells, oblivions, limbos. 

I've not yet got around to conjuring a Heaven into my writing. All Heavens, as they do, turn out to be mirages of ideals. At least thus far. 

The year after this book Opal, I was in New York, and there from that comes the series of misadventuring events that led to the Holy Guardian Angel of later writing coming to uncannily resemble a certain Emily, I've mentioned ad nauseum elsewhere. An Em-ulator, an actress, a Double. 

Like James Merrill at his oujia board, I'm weaving a sensible poetics out of all this personal, abstruse material.

I'm burning myself out, hurrying with all this stuff. One never knows when I will be reincarnated as the great-great grandchild of a woman I currently love. That would complicate matters more, I'd say.

---

And you can imagine those stanzas with the voice of Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett show in the '70s, speaking with great love and solemnity about his brothers.