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John Macker |
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COCHISE & THE BAD LIEUTENANT Harvey Keitel glares like Mephistopheles from that poster Pointing his Hollywood gun at the lens Is the Bad Lieutenant with Some species of pent-up menacing Existential fury Aimed at me Innocent American moviegoer Not a lone fucking innocent in the room He seems to be saying Not even Cochise Whose eyes are wisps of Chiricahua smoke Or rolled Mogadishu bloody Sunrise smoke of future war & Pent-up locomotive fatalism aimed At the world but not the planet: Bathes as a family man In the splashing sunshine glare Justified killer of red meat In the healing springs of these rare waters Neither Cochise nor Bad Lieutenant Would get extreme unction they Just got extreme Keitel character on the streets on his knees In the church Cochise upstream climbing boulder to Boulder hunted down like a dog Until his was a small band Uphill reloading carbines as they ran Through the summer manzanita brown torso centrifugal sweat In perpetual propulsion He didn't have the crooked cop's Gambling debts but surely Shared the same notions of Inevitability & The absurd. Winter falls across blue language -for Ted Berrigan Ted sits in a school desk three Sizes too small, surrounded by America Mennonite beard on His face, arms about THIS wide apart Making a point in the air with the Sheer volume of his presence. I think he's On his way to Baltimore There are worn white sneakers on the Wood floor in front of his desk He has allowed this picture to be taken. He speaks for an entire American ghost Procession of language which he never Surrendered, surrounded by mortality in Every fissure wired to New York & Tulsa Adopted son. Winter rain falls across Ted's blue language Disturbed on his tongue Alone in his fierce cloth coat, belly exposed to The elements & loaded for bear Against the winds of Manhattan, walking up the cold Sidewalk to a fellow poet's flat, Glasses fogged-up, chilled to the bone Rebel incarnate & His voice like a raven's whispers in my loins from tonight's sky & a red anthill of stars: Yerba de la negrita plus Cochise forever Across the wide Rio Grande "The gods are burning us just to keep warm." |