after Michael McClure’s “Ghost Tantra 49”
this is my ghost tantra—no!—tantrum—that’s what spellcheck does—
operative now
in best friend—he is beat
poet this May morning reciting
to lions
at some interior zoo—the roars
and GRRRRs rising from deep body—a messy dada-lectic—
loops of noise
so even the lion in me paces—he is alone
with it—maned and fanged—my own brain in tandem—
inventing
devil-speech to fill the gaps—mists
of consciousness that salve—conceal this (his)
dying—
he longs to see me—he does
not—each day another silken trail after rain—performance
of embarrassment
and forgetting with
Depends—he cannot trust body now—cannot own
brain—
how pieces of it drop out of the sky like spent
birds when we speak—rags of broken-winged
litter—the words
still words but burnished with excess protein
maybe tangled neurons cut with the Niagara gorge
(where he swam)—
father-anger residues—how we each wanted
to cold-cock rotten bastard nurture where it stood—then
chair ballet—
phone-worry—toe tap—pill pill swallow—
he is hungry yet again needs to piss is sleeping—
O thou whole
and feeling creature—my cry
ecstatic lashes out with jet sound now over ocean
and cloud
deck—ailerons edged in sunlight—they too
silvered—knifing at whatever shear adorns them—
cutting
wind from wind—the hydraulics in them
same blood-pulse as in your face or my arms or that
coil of time
that ignites when I leave and
you nap and whatever livingness that will happen next assaults us