Heart
of the Breath by Jim Brodey
Excerpts
Fred Frith 6
Fluidity guides me and
The subway keeps me strong
Music pouring out of every pore
Me a glass of prognosis positive
To paraphrase Bette Davis' acid remark
To George Brent in "Dark Victory"
While Geraldine Fitzgerald stared
And we giggled at life passing by
Beyond the television screens of infancy
Upon those ole playing fields of brick and gravel
Somewhere not too distant near Hackensack
Shouldering a generation of gridlock
These streets that are our hearts
Burn with a peculiar intensity
Familiar by infra-sound welts
Eye of the calm man and
Ordinary guy on the street
Whose silence is full of magnets
And a head rose flowerous
As the subway is not
Floating in our ow/n juices
Love is that burning flora
That drops no pineapples before
Their time matriculates me
Into the origin of petrified giggle
First amidst the bedlam of cool selves
Now take this plow and use it
As a toothbrush against decay
Hack away at those brain barnacles
Lift the weight of ignorance with music
Jack Kerouac
Whole new era for holy Lunacy is sublime
Bardic poetry returned to the children
Of the living breathing void in work pants
Get a hoe and dig up a field plant your fruits
And nuts will fall on childlike graybeards
Tearing up the rules and gloomy pusses of Academy
Get smart you lazy fucks the discipline is
The true blue song of man and woman alike
So write with amazement towards yourself
Come on in from under you're the original
Genius open and listening to the babbling mindflow
Excited by looking at Americans in cars
The road is endless grey supermonster
Marred by trashy slopes the diners are beautiful
Chrome and glass and moody people stabbing
Their own little piece of the pie fraught
With a thousand difficulties unspeakably proud
Spit shine grandiose rising to Promethean heights
The torments of great formations in mist
Not editorialized here but lifted to vision
Spine heights at the sad end of eternity
Empty wine bottle cold as Hoboken in November
Or Mission Street in ancient San Francisco
Where the lawns grow heather-like and men
Caught in the whirlwind of heaven worldweary
Men leaning into holes in space on lawns green
Pills coming on the earth revolving into sleep
Liquid incantations not known outside the bayou
Agility mystery sadness immensities stretches of
Universe that have his name on them words the key
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