THE OCTOGENERIAN
Approaching my father's 80th birthday
makes me feel young for my age
I've retired
he still works
I think he's a shyster lawyer
He thinks I'm a paper poet
Shyster lawyers and paper poets bleed in the tweed
so we
understand
one-in-other
What to send him for a birthday present?
a hard-on?
Better to keep it for myself
I'm sure he'd say
(Sept. '74)
(a year has passed)
My eighty year old octopappy
(knowing he's mortal
dyes his hair dark brown
not because he's vain
It's better for business he claims)
is coming to town
but first
he has to close a real estate deal
No wonder
he calls me
a communist gypsy
In the same vein
a judge in court
accused me
of watching the world
go by
I held my tongue
I wasn't his son
ZIG ZAG
Jesus & I
were both busted
in occupied Jerusalem
at supposedly different points
in time
for supposedly different
crimes
in the very land he encountered
Mary Magdalene
and said:
"Let he who is without sin cast the
stone." I got stoned
and then met my wife Susan
a dark-eyed Hashemite beauty
from Brooklyn
in an Arab cafe
Boy meets Girl
we made love & peed in the bushes
on Mt. Zion
overlooking hallowed halls
of ancient worship
Now, years later,   I see her
occasionally
in occupied
Berkeley
EXCATHEDRA
Hundreds of revolutions
...of the earth later
The Church exonerates Galileo
Who exonerates the Church?
God?
Headline:
Pope absolves Solar System
For its unearthly centeredness
Admits
the mariner of the mind
Discoverer
of moons of Jupiter
Phases of Venus
Meteor marked
Craters of the moon
& skating rink
Rings of Saturn
Suffered
"From the departments of the Church"
(i.e. Inquisition,
Celestial oceans
in a drop of blood)
--Assigns specialists
To study "the Galileo episode"
(a 350 yr. P.R. beating
His Holiness hopes to reverse)
Roll over Copernicus
Tell Newton the news.
QUESTIONAIRE
Is the opposite of anger
forgiveness?
Are we responsible for our faces?
Is security life's biggest
delusion?
At what point do we exchange
our freedom for it?
Is death our state of
being before birth?
Did dying become mandatory with the gift of orgasm?
Why is the hunger of
our loins the itch for self-replication?
Is desire convoluted
narcissism?
Are daily suspensions
of disbelief doses of reality?
Is manipulative paranoia
the wave of the future?
Did we train the enemy
on whom war we declare?
And when, finally, will
the epoch of mind-fuck end?