 Bob Kaufman for me was a meteorite, remains a meteorite and I would come up and do Kaufman sightings in North Beach and I saw Bobby one day, I'll call him Bobby, I'll call him Uncle Robert, but he was in front of me and he literally disappeared in front of my eyes. Just like the situation at Paz talks about Possoa disappearing on the streets of Lisbon and Bob and I were proximate on several occasions, we never met directly because Philip Lamontia and I wandered the streets of North Beach looking for Bobby one afternoon, we couldn't find him. But hours later we all congregated at the Neely Tchaikovsky's house and I saw the original manuscript of the ancient ring, the original and Bob was in the next room. So I wrote this essay, I'm just going to read a part of it, it's called the footnotes exploded, no footnotes, no academia with Bob, a voyager arriving in a darkened opal port, his verbal lenses honed by ingrown verbal preciseness, by an absence of buried mechanics. I think of the nascent Kaufman inwardly floating through explosive anemones never once singed by mundane repetition or sequel. His hearing is replete at the level of intuitive terminology at the root of its most seminal spinning. His language part aurora and lava flowing from a central vitrescence. It partakes of the spell being hypnotic and genetic and demeanor. I mean there is insight into life which sustains itself by means of intrinsic purity, by means of necessitous obscurity which can never be subjected to rational decoding to exoteric decipherment. Language then is not a given, not a sum to be captured and examined under a prevalent electron regalia. Verbal obstacle then leaps the accessible as sense, the quotidian as assumption. By his electrical presence Kaufman's language escapes the analytical, the moment by moment vacuum deemed climatic according to president assumed by the rules of rational exeges and such exeges denies and destroys the spontaneous in favor of pattern. Again Kaufman not a deleted fuchsia but original respiration, a voice capable of traversing acres of fire, his mandibles torched by elemental tattoos by various interior grails. And when compel such attention is his superior analogical power aged by a fabulous turbulence as if he had been cast into the fructive waters of the center of a brimstone mountain. It is a poetic energy which continues to prevail and by prevailing I mean sustained hypnosis as experienced by the reader. I wanted to continue with one of my all time mantras to my park, to my son Parker asleep in the next room. On ochre walls and ice formed caves, shaggy neanderthals marked their place in time. On germinal trees and equatorial stands embryonic giants carved beginnings. On Tasmanian flatlands mudclothed first men hacked rocks still soft, on Melanesian mountain peaks barked heads were reared in pride and beauty. On steamy javas cooling lava stooped humans raised stones to alter height. On newborn China's plain mythless sons of Han acquired peaked gods with teak faces. On holy India's sacred soil future gods carved and worshiped reflection. On Coptic Ethiopia's pimple rock pyramid builders tore volcanoes from earth. On death loving Egypt's godly sands living sacrifices carved naked power. On Samaria's cliffs speech this artist's gouge messages to men yet uncreated. On glorious Assyria's earthen dens art priests chipped figures of awe and hidden dimensions. On splendid Peru's gold stained body filigree temples were torn from severed hands. On perfect Greece's body sights marble stirred under hands of men. On degenerate Rome's trembling sod imitators sculpted lies into beauty. On slave Europe's prostrate form chains sold shaped free men. On wild America's green torso original men painted glacial languages. On cold articles snowy surface leathery men raised totems and frozen air. On this shore you will all men before forever eternally free in all things. On this shore we shall raise our monuments of stones of wood of mud of color of labor of belief of being of life of love of self of man expressed in self-determined compliance or willful revolt secure in this truth that no man is our master nor can any ever be at any time and time to come tuning tuning is poetry. You have to tune the being through alchemy you know everything Bob did was a tuning and that's what a poet has to do every step every breath you take is tuning it's alchemical tuning and it comes out in a language because poetry is like trees and wind and stars it grows from the inside out not the outside end. And so one of my most trenchant influences has been Joanne Miro the great painter and Kauffman has felt the same way he wrote a poem called The Rumeiro I think that's what Bob was born in the Rumeiro in New Orleans Rumeiro Miro the flowers are up there on the wall where I last saw them and the time before that various with hot dots sticking out all over prancing darkly in their wooden frame their wall dancing like gypsies on the roof of a drum Miro there is a street with your name named before you after you then and now it floats and drops and shadings stranded in a fake Spain farther than Montroy way off a wet place of hot rains and yellow long leaf plants named for a broken son King Louisiana rhymes with yesterday gone past moved on ghostly brown wishes Miro your name is a black ribbon in a stabbed landscape rave cold forms slanted against a stew of burning symbols and eyes blatantly honking ducks go unnoticed and expensive feathers a faceless place of curving blood and fingering motions Miro empty turtles glide between a divide of baroque hotels fleeing to Shelley nest deep inside a scooped-out truth a scope of thinning cries a course of glinting oysters heavy draperies from to lawn and rooms of drowning furniture dangling in the mind's eye a walk through berserk air Miro I was born on your street 40,000 years ago in a year of April's and screamed a flock of dazed geese scattered Miro on that street I heard a fever and saw a white moon by the Galvez greens broken into millions of transparencies and after Bob you know I how can I do anything but right so this is the blood penguin of my own I am a carn I am the carnivore the hounded night Walker searching for my wings scattered under glass they claim I should return to monomial transfixing to exhibit a and no further to some I'm six foot and lizard to others I'm considered a mange lamb returned from the tropics I'm never given due as to some a proportion I'm seen as the source of something leprous as no longer the motive of who I was thought I was shaped to be I who live is misstate late damage as part of pointless verbal ejecta there are no nouns to ensnare me to fish up my blood so as to summon consensus I'm never that conditioned within the fire of conjoinment I'm never to be the human boy genius the archivist the barred child contending with study I'm none of the above none of the aforesaid compendiums I am the animus the vertical lion tundra the diamond bird who burrows under snow because of my leaning I know the stark Egyptian soma much as would have blinded cemetery scribe and because I understand one's basic neural unravelment I am seen as paeacular as specter as both standing and freezing being of some other form from some other planet as clinical moray addendum this contains in itself black and scroll marks from Moravia from squander quanta from the soon the islands from quaking fogs from Santiago they say I suffer from part powerful deafening by resistance my eyes wild and inforoscious with lapses the attention span blunted the astrological paralysis shifted so they say the unknown is the trigonomic is the transcendent nucleus the born equational spell according to the flaws in universal summoning I am ancient pantomime who cannot grasp who cannot transgress his inherited londino as to my in glyphs and squares I'm plummeted I'm simply without the means to conduct my own prism to make to take on the culpable mean at circumstantial limit I exist through negated practical limit through parallel subcauses without knowing the desire to seek the enzymes of living I am without and without and without I who create doubt and the genetics of perpetual conflict I could be strange as a human half-wrought who poses himself as Ilario Pazuelos it what is claimed against me is not unreasoned is not the treatise of post fanatics instead it is a curious treatise on circumstantial exhibit it says my values are possessed by distance like someone humbled or plagued by a treaty my dispossessed senses described by these methods under the forms of the treasonous it tells me I am lifeless blood equipment that my genes are not useful that my mind is simply stricken or exposed yet such a chronicle loses spores in the glass years it says I am of Africa and the seacoast of Ghana and the seychelles of insular breakage near the oizours yet it states my non placement my cavern my debilitating refuge not even a dwelling beneath the stars as a theory camp based on Saturn such is the ether climb the sub revelation is die electrical cartography conjoining with the ocelots swimming across the prisms of Mauritius or simple flat land in Manchuria these are seen as soils no known warrior can claim because I readily announced my resistance my tone as carnivorous psychic sparring wandering beyond pervasive death concussives claimed by genetic dislogistics by anarchic ruin by Jurassic sibling cirrhosis I cannot describe by cursory enclosure external motivation or any rotary a back flowing water attainment it is described as simulacra as ghost data is hibernation through pillage non-specific post necrotic partaking in part as jungle and longevity of course of course the cells blaze infinity evolves the monsoons project through containment it nothing resolves nothing for bears and his climate I exist as steep electrical ice asking of myself spells of pointless dominating fuels within this agnostic current I describe myself as one who's hellish who's buried his weight with a double insistence who seems to sleep in a brazen cylinder apparel then after a pause and listening calling myself the blood penguin embraced by squalls by an oily and misshapen blinding