A Coney Island of the Mind

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Cast up the heart flops over gasping 'Love' a foolish fish which tries to draw its breath from flesh of air And no one there to hear its death among the sad bushes where the world rushes by in a blather of asphalt and delay

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn.

Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru

You and me could really exist

I too have drunk and seen the spider

I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail

I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale

I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off

Not like Dante discovering a commedia upon the slopes of heaven I would paint a different kind of Paradiso in which the people would be naked as they always are in scenes like that because it is supposed to be a painting of their souls but there would be no anxious angels telling them how heaven is the perfect picture of a monarchy and there would be no fires burning in the hellish holes below in which I might have stepped nor any altars in the sky except fountains of imagination

Don’t Let That Horse . . .” from A Coney Island of the Mind. Don’t let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall’s mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached

telling over to myself/ how beauty never dies/ but lies apart/ among the aborigines/ of art/ and far above the battlefields/ of love

her eyes downcast all the while/ and singing to herself

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer

watching the world walk by in its curious shoes

and I am waiting/ for Alice in Wonderland/ to retransmit to me/ her total dream of innocence

And heard the green birds singing/ from the other side of silence

is where I first/ fell in love/ with unreality

I have seen the Virgin in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux Arts on the Fourteenth of July and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley's.

I am going where turtles win I am going where conmen puke and die Down the sad esplanades of the official world.

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman.

Truth is not the secret of a few' yet you would maybe think so the way some librarians and cultural ambassadors and especially museum directors act you'd think they had a corner on it the way they walk around shaking their high heads and looking as if they never went to the bath room or anything But I wouldn't blame them if I were you They say the Spiritual is best conceived in abstract terms and then too walking around in museums always makes me want to 'sit down' I always feel so constipated in those high altitudes

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hep to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad

Blink at the sunned scratch and stumble into silence

and balancing on eye beams/ above a sea of faces/ paces his way/ to the other side of day

and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene