July 26, 1994: I debuted my poem "Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress"

Thirty years ago today

            On Tuesday night I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage in the Art Bar of the Gladstone Hotel. There was a good turnout, including the first visits from John Barlow, Adeena Karasick and Death Waits who formed their own little bubble in a corner and giggled like school kids playing hooky.

            This was the Gumby Bible group poem for the night: 

Put on your space-helmet Baby 

& get ready for fall

Leave off all that you're doing 

You just might grow tall

in the breeze...then you're gone out 

& lost your baseball down the sewer again

Oust add last your lassi all dew the sewer ajar

Ah yes, impudent & yet luquiscently musical...insical

My problem...my poetry's problem: 

I assume people are dead to the world 

I read the previous lines & think

how impudent it was for John & Adeena 

to ignore the rhyming scheme of the 1st stanza

So it seems that Siskel & Ebert were right 

Two thumbs in the same stanza 

are worth all the space-helmets on Bloor street

Is that all that poetry is... here & now? Where's here? 

Struggling poets wrestling with the void 

The spaces between the characters & the words 

fall through the cracks in my breathing apparatus 

I hope the oxygen will last until I reach the surface

Arnature upright//outasight 

lusty old woman with attitude 

& then Adeena & Nancy (Primadonnas) did put on a skit 

had a drink of coffeewater & passed it off as wit 

A pantomime of passe rude 

& with a drink well...something lewd 

My drunkenness

But you knew this already

O goody,goody! here we go again Poetry! 

Sing a song for John Bonham. 

            I debuted my poem “Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress”: 

So here I'm again with my writing

That illusive nomadic muse 

that comes charging from the unconscious frontier

like a ravaging horde of Mongols

to lay waste the card-house empire

of my conceptual mind 

is back now to dance on the damage with me

well at least for one more clumsy time

But nowadays I have to venture

deep into its sweet resting place

drag it kicking & screaming from out of its bed

& then slap it till its wide awake

just to nail down its dancing convulsions

like Christ on my high forehead's cross

Oh but make no mistake from the shape of this mask

Know my muse it is always the boss

Each one of my comatose projects 

that had lain there so dumb on their backs

half-formed, like thalidomide babies so long

are now spread like a thousand card hand 

of poker dealt out by the dealer 

who is my sweet imprisoned muse

But I'm beguiled by all the wild jokers I find

in this deck that I've so much abused

All the brutalized ink-blackened pages

that had crunched themselves into soft balls 

in the killer womb inside my frustrated fist

& to warm smoky freedom had rolled 

away on the underground railroad

conducted by garbage truck crews

well they're back now to fight

through my memory's court 

for their forty pages & a muse

Yes I'm back once again with my baby 

that had swum for so long in the womb

& the ultrasound films of that boring process 

are continuous echo-reruns 

on the nightmarish Walt Disney channel

that plays in my subconscious mind

providing the vaguest reflection of me 

that my ego could hope to design

It’s my fantasy's one-sided quarrel

I won't have to avert my eyes

& there's no counter-wit here I must circumvent

There's nobody to tell me I lie

So I'll lie in here all by my lonesome

just soaking up in my own brew

that’s so warm & so deep

I just might go to sleep 

in this alphabetic-stupor-stew

I use this typewriter to hammer 

a hole for myself in the wall 

of the towering mountain of purposefulness

& my voice as a beckoning call

to call you all out of your caverns

so I can then investigate

& comparatively determine the size

of my own spread of surrealestate

If you've all been knocked on your asses

in as many good & bad ways

then you're fattened by memory 

like I have become

& writing is one way to lose weight

Cause experiencing & teaching 

are two halves of one breathing process

& those of us holding a lungful of life 

can now pass on that eventful breath 

But our tiny Minds can't seem to handle 

Sensation's chaotic crossfire

that charges the electrical circuitry 

of each moment that challenges time

So that’s why we cause them to mutate 

& bleed into future & past

diluting them into a thin lady's drink

who's tall volume might cushion their blast

Then we sip with the greatest of leisure

Hope & memory's candy cane straws 

reweld them back into a plastic moment

merely flawed by some surgical scars 

that run like a railroad track border 

between these two nations at war

whose dividing line is as hard to define 

as the one between ocean & shore

Yes we tend to keep our lives separate

from Reality's smashing sea 

with dams made of bones 

from our clinking closets

& amnesia: the sealant between

Then we prick that dyke-wall with pinholes

to let just a little bit through

But its high where the wall's thin enough to be pricked

& the footholds are so very few

& most of us are far too lazy 

to climb up to where its that thin

& less of us have the digestive system 

that will hold that effulgent-juice in 

long enough so that when we do spit it 

deep into some young thirsty mind

it won't be so rich as to make the kid sick

or go down as more grape-juice than wine

But in my life the grey knotted tapeworm 

that is my excuse for a soul 

keeps me stealing that blood that’s been barely tasted 

from that foaming-toothed vampire’s hole

that serves as the garbage disposal 

of prayer, of blessing, of curse & of sigh

from who's lips we read the equations of time

& who's nickname is simply "the sky"

Sometimes it takes years of rewriting 

to translate one moment in time

& though the translation is never complete

it might unveil a piece of my mind

& almost just might count for something 

in writing, as in hand grenades

which though they fall short of the targeted mass

they still manage to blow it away

But I write cause I don't have the courage

to sit or to stand or to walk

in peace so I mirror these black fireworks

inside me with a crude voodoo-doll 

that shields me from most of my demons

but is also a fisherman’s net 

to catch them to serve as the ingredients 

in my diet of dark-angel flesh

It's a parachute serving to soften 

my descent through solitude's space 

(that bottomless mind-shaft of boredom & fear

that I tumble through from day to day)

& I fall through these out of time moments 

with or without pen in place

wrapped up in a mirror-lined crystal cocoon 

that will give me illusions of space

But what sails me away from one island 

of boredom becomes one in kind

So even though I get a sense of focus

lining up with a moment in time

its too bad it isn't the moment 

my body is feeding upon

but a moment that hangs in the perilous air

no momentum to carry it on

I can't seem to hold my attention 

when ideas fly in large flocks

but the counterbalance of this difficulty

is my flexible method of thought

& a talent for seeing the order 

that lies in perception's outback

which renders me so much more beautiful 

than the rest of you cloven-brained hacks

My acrobatical circus-boy mind 

keeps on seeping through all of the cracks 

in conception & emerges triumphantly 

as a glistening penis-head buck

Yes I'm raking the sky with my antlers

& their explosion frozen in time

a quicksilver ejaculation that sprouts 

from a well at the core of my mind

My thoughts are slowed down by my writing 

just long enough to be shocked 

by their image reflected inside of the page

& for one fleeting moment be caught 

like deer staring into car headlights

just long enough to be pulled back 

inside myself to become the soundtrack 

of my dance for the Calendar Girl

They go back in myself

orchestrate the striptease

of my Internal Calendar-Girl