Shamanic Letter (4)

DOCTOR

Nov. 13, 2005

A Frova, Prednasone, two Tegretols,
a cup of Cuban coffee, some AA
literature, a bit of sexual reverie,
doses of Faust Part II and Eliade
and Jessie Weston & I’m off:
Here at 5:15 on a Sunday morning,
exhausted from all the work we put
into a our so-so yard sale (enough to help
pay the next round of bills) but feeling
well enough to sing here again, the way
I do when I’m not feeling well at all,
only less pained to do be so verbally
pained. Does that matter at all to You?
Will my tongue actually become too
clotted with its joy to swirl the milky
depths of Soma’s awful truths buried
deeper in these words for a rougher
wilder world than I alone could not
have lived, much less sung to all the
gods? An owl hoots from a dark
tree in our dark neighborhood and
yet again, scaring off Hamlet’s Ghost
in his fatherly equipage. A third time
yet, holding my mind to that edge
between this waking world and
Your wet thundering surge
of all abyssal blissful ends. I’ve come
to trust this hour’s mood of matin chant,
the charm of sound between the lobes
of aging brain and bone, staircasing down
the foam of waters which drowned
You a thousand singers’ songs ago.
Is there a physic of the word which
knits wounds with verbal herbs
plucked from the blackest hedge beyond
the last lights of nighttown? When I
left for college I planned to study to
become a doctor of some sort, of
medicine or divinity for sure (as all
fools and adolescents swear), healing
the world of my own vast wounds, of
my parents’ and their parents’ more
vast and vaster woundings too. But
one course in human biology revealed
a nature in those wounds which refused
taxonomy; in all the catalogue of doors
that might have opened them at last
-- muscular-skeletal doors, digestive ones,
circulatory labyrinths opening and closing
not that heart, endrocrinal egresses,
the royal road of neurons rising a spine
which was no arch I knew inside, beyond
those sterile names -- None of that seemed
wild or wet enough to shore that seeming
sea that sucked my toes at night and
drowned me with my dreams. My father
saw me as a Princeton man, packing
me onto my westbound flight decked in
a blue blazer he thought a future man
of God would be desired by every
monied pulpit in the realm; yet I
stepped off that plane far west of home
and was aghast to see my peers in
ratty jeans and hippie shirts, the girls
all Californian, so mephistophelean bright
I swore their smiles had roots in
tie-died thunderwear. Divinity adieu!
I swore, hanging up that blue blazer
for good. New older gods were singing
to me from a blue, blacker wood,
half-pecker, half trunk wild-hurling
ache, a forest of guitar necks stained
in hooch. Topside by day I was just
a dorky college freshman with a
nowhere kind of face, blundering
from dorm to class amid such freshening
tits and ass weaving, like fog, through
all those cathedralling pines. Further
down, far from topside view, the freshly
unGodded man sought infernal solace
in the words. I loved history and
Western Civ and writing poetry the
way I loved and hated solitude,
tearing into texts like meat and bleeding
inharmoniously as I tried to write poems,
line after sing-song line, page after silly
page. In Your tutorage I was wholly blind
to the nurture of its nocturned source;
dark breasts swole unseen to books
lending to my greedy lips all that coffee
coffee and those cigarettes in long hours
of riven study where I proved nothing
to the world but a raging, distant solitude.
Each line I read and wrote was like
a suture on my lips, sealing me tight
into a darkened room far so fucking
far below. Savage boobs by day
denied by every passing blouse sure
put the hurt in thirst as I guzzled
later beers by night, cans secreted
in my basement window and packed
in snow as the fall fell all the way.
I drank a sixpack every night while
my monkish ink dried on the page,
spinning Jethro Tull and Led Zep III
on my tiny tinny stereo, my hands
twitching as Jimmy Page led the way
on “Since I Been Lovin You” down
perdition’s 12-bar road of blues,
riffing astride the dragon of that red Gibson
ES-335. I wanted none of it and all it,
the word and world I mean: I would
have given my entire soul for one night
free of books and poems as their
awful consequence in me, the IsoSoul,
the gray-faced scholist with with the
tiny pen that spewed such feral ire.
And that’s just what You offered me a
ways on further down that winter’s
hoary night: A woman walked out of
that pinewood mist to grip my penis
tight inside her half-looped mouth.
I couldn’t come for the life of me,
not even for my soul, though I traded
it any way -- too shocked to be so
naked of all words, I guess -- lost my
spermal virginity months later on
a stopvoer in Chicago -- But
from that night my studies found a
tooth to them, turning every ivory
tower into an alabaster cock to pluck
and shove down all the wells of Her --
Her/Your -- conspiratorial blue dolor.
Thus my truer education thrust me down
the ramps of fire, soon plugged into
an amplifier & wielding an electric
blue guitar, burning every word I know
between Persephone’s own thighs,
good-time queen in that honky tonk
at the bottom of every night’s too
fathomed wild desire. Doctor indeed
I am, of petrel cry beyond all waking
surf, my bag stuffed with starfish and
sand dubbloons and sea-kelp and moss
and man o wars. My physic still drips here
from every soggy word I cried between
a mother’s thighs I fell out and back for good.