Atched over Denver

atched over Denver & brooded & loned in

Denver and finally went away to find out the

Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying

for each other's salvation and light and breasts,

until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for

impossible criminals with golden heads and the

charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet

blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky

Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys

or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or

Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the

daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp

notism & were left with their insanity & their

hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism

and subsequently presented themselves on the

granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads

and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-

stantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin

Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-

therapy occupational therapy pingpong &

amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic

pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of

blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad

man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the

East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid

halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-

ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench

dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-

mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the

moon,

with mother finally *, and the last fantastic book

flung out of the tenement window, and the last

door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone

slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-

nished room emptied down to the last piece of

mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted

on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that

imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of

hallucination

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and

now you're really in the total animal soup of

time

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed

with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use

of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-

ing plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space

through images juxtaposed, and trapped the

archangel of the soul between 2 visual images

and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun

and dash of consciousness together jumping

with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna

Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human

prose and stand before you speechless and intel-

ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-

fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm

of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,

yet putting down here what might be left to say

in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in

the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the

suffering of America's naked mind for love into

an eli eli lamma lamma s