 According to Jerry Stoll, the late photographer, Bob was a functioning pioneer as a critic of society. Rested 39 times. Who's been arrested once? Meaningful, you know, he bypassed the Ginsburg mafia, Ginsburg coterie, to get beyond that. He started the situation that others followed and has not been given his due, unfortunately. He says, I too know what I am not. No, I am not death wishes of sacred rapists singing on candy gallows. No, I am not spore of creole murderers hiding in crepe paper by use. No, I am not yells of some assassinated inventor locked in his burning machine. No, I am not forced breathing of Cairo's senile burglar in lead shoes. No, I am not Indian summer fruit of Negro piano tuners with muslin gloves. No, I am not noise of two gun senators and hallowed peppermint hall. No, I am not pipe smoke hopes of cynical Cairo practice traffickers in ill legal bone. No, I am not pitch blend curse of Indian suicides and bonnets of flaming water. No, I am not soap powder size of impotent window washes and pants of air. No, I am not kisses of tuberculous sun addicts smiling through rayon lips. No, I am not chipped philosophers tattered ideas sunk in his granite brain. No, I am not cry of amethyst harren winged stone in flight from cambrick bullets. No, I am not sting of neurotic bee frustrated in cheesecloth gardens. No, I am not peel of muted bell clapperless in the faded glory. No, I am not report of silenced guns helpless in the pacifist hands. No, I am not called a wounded hunter alone in the forest of bone. No, I am not eyes of the infant owls hatching the ruthless night. No, I am not the whistle of a vana horse with cribs of Cuban death. No, I am not shriek of Bantu children bent under penny whistle whips. No, I am not whisper of the African trees leafy telephones. No, no, I am not lead belly of the blues escaping from guitar jails. No, I am not anything that is anything I am not. Being a social critic, Bobby was understanding of the situation that we are always in the United States. Just heard a program this morning about the possibility of internment for citizens. This particular poem, I guess, goes right into this situation. We're under now. We're talking about walls and pits for human beings to swelter in. We already see it in Syria. It's gaining momentum. And trouble is a species. And human species and bop is picking that up. Telepathones in 1946. So here we are in 20, could be 2076, but the dates go on and the people don't. The neurology has been stunted and derailed and put in these incalculable vats of absence. Selling bakeries of total recall. Sometimes I feel the ones who escape the ovens where Germans shall forever cook their spiritual meals or leaning against my eyes. A wounded Margolis in his suit of horror, his eyes of elevated Brownsville, that taste of gas in his smile. I could hear it when my ears were Mexican weed. My first reaction is to be angry with Moses for not committing suicide. My second reaction is to be furious with the Germans for not committing suicide. My third reaction is one of total disappointment for not committing suicide. I think of chaplain and roll a mental cigarette. I slowly remove my bayonet, write a poem about a poetic poem dedicated to the Aleutian Islands. The bony doorway beyond the burning nose translates me into Hebrew. I know that Phos was actually anti-symbolic. It would never have married Kate Smith. And how many Ophelia's escaped from Ruth's letter are teenage cancellations out here? Here's my brain receipt. Take my skin check. I want Juliet on the roof. Because of what happened, sex is holy by virtue of arithmetic and welcome dampness. Someone hurled an eyelid at the moon. My shadow wanders off lost and black side streets, vulnerable to the cooling soft switchblade of light blinking. Don't walk, green. My footsteps follow me at a distance. I acknowledge the demands of surrealist realization. I challenge a pollinaire to stagger drunk from his grave and write a poem about the Rosenbergs' last days in a housing project. Al Salvador Agron spread his cape for one last snap shot of Jesus speeding through Puerto Rico, his car radio blasting, mowing down the tilting hiltons, speeding to the voltage mass of Sing Sing, the famous Gothic burning gats on the banks of the sacred Hudson. And yet when I think of those ovens, I turn my head in any other direction. I'm doing my best to dry my mind. The brain's a bully. I go to hospitals named after sadists with diseases that don't exist and demand famous operations that Dr. Schweitzer hasn't invented yet. They give me drugs while I wait for Albert to emerge from the jungle. His wise organ music may remove this malingering sensitivity before it infects my other organs. The rabbi across the table from me is also a firm believer in suicide. He wanted to be an actor on Second Avenue and eat dinner across from the theater and be insecure and marry an Adler and talk about parets and alchemy in Secunda and wake up to find himself with an important role in an established theater. He is holy in each very little and reads like a scholar and wants to kill himself. I refuse to tell him the time. If necessary, I will write the script and we will go together. Surrealism, Bob was the great surrealist of the par excellence, according to Philip Lamontia, talked about it quite a bit. And doing poetry, for me, was an incredible journey. And I was looking for, I had a brief conversation with Octavio Paz one day. He was asking me about my conversations with the French writers, but I had to talk about Bob Kaufman. Because, you know, I have to work with my English because as a friend of mine once says, it's just going to have to do. So, you know, this is a poem about poetry that tests the metal of the young person when he or she is developing his or her craft and it's entitled Apprenticeship. And it works a number on your circulatory system, believe me. And I will use a quote here from Octavio Paz. It's between impulses and repentances, between advances and retreats. It's from his eagle of sun work, 48, 49, 4950, Broad Marquez and everybody in the view of that book. But here I am posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets. Sonnets as rare as a live Aegean rhino. Absorbing the cracklings of my craft, its riverine volcanoes, its spectacular lightning peninsulas emitting plentiful creosote phantoms from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pluromas. Scouring through years of unrecognized pablums of constant arch rivalry with extinction, bringing up skulls of intensive discourse by the claws in one's mind which seemed to burn with a systemic reduction. One then suffers poetic scorching by debris, by inaugural timber which flashes, by friction which flares up and harries by unrecognized molten, collapsing glass of initial intuitive neglect. As if one's fangs were fatally stifled by incipients, by verbal range war didactics, by territorial driftwood, by sudden undemonstrative detractions awed by the diverse infernos of trachel and Dante. One's youngish body stands devoured by reverential print trails momentarily canceled by the loss of blasphemous nerves and upheaval stung by demanding neutralities ravaged by a blank, some uttering solar psychosis, by a tasteless collision of rums in transition, by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris. As one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blistered trees, there exist irradiations flat with a gamble synactity with indeterminate earthenware splinters taking up from aboriginal densely a forge of Sumerian verbal signs, cooked with a tendency towards starfish hypnosis, towards psychic confrontational drainage, conducting one's frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis and ire. Yes, apprenticeship means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper's mosaic, cringed in smoky interior cubicles, releasing various deliriums, as if pointed under a blackened adipose star, with its dark and capable tense with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna. Poetics, an imaginal flash of rushing chamber lilies stretching under a blue marsupial sun, like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed, fugaciously transfixed upon an anomalous totem of glints, upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise. Of course, kinetic like magical malachite rivers flowing from moons blowing through the three-quarter summits of motionless anginas. I've looked only for the tonalities that scorch, which bring to my lips wave after wave of sensitivity by virulence. Yes, a merciless bitterness, brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter, in a desiccated storm of inferential parallels in voltage, like scattered igneous winds, contaminous with the bleeding hiatus and resumption of breath, resolved by flashpoint edicts by consumptive stellar limes, by curvature-intense proto-Brotonian fatigue, mixing magnets, juggling centripetal antipodes and infinities, cracking the smoke of pure epestral magentas. Yes, hatcheries, floating through a settling corruption of practice mental restraint, two splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette. Its mysteriums always leaping like a grainy flash of scorching tarantulas, or leaking moon-spun allostophas, as if speaking in a regular glaciological green dutch, a frenetic seminar on ferbricity, a reiteration of Hinda's syllabic agitation and singing of ferocious vacillation, explosive as random aggregational notes, mined by a blank consulantal dissection. Its maximal priority forked at hypotactic inclusion with isochronous internal procedure with ratios with phonic penetrallia by distortion, primed by anomalous nuclear accent by a cadence composing syllables and compounds. Yes, poetics, its force jettisoned by hypotaxis, by perotactic coordination and fire, African dream, in black-core of night, it explodes, silver thunder rolling back my brain, bursting copper screens, memory whirls, deep in star-fed beds of time, seducing my soul to diamond fires of night, faint outline, a ship, momentary fright, lifted on waves of color, sunk in pits of light, drummed back through time, humpback through mind, drumming, crackling the night, strange forest songs, skin sounds crashing through, no longer strange, incestuous yellow flowers tearing magic from the earth, moon-dipped rituals, led by a scarlet god, caressed by ebony maidens with daylight eyes, purple garments, noses that twitch, singing young girl songs of an ancient love in dark, sunless places where memories are sealed, burned in eyes of tigers. Suddenly wise, I fight the dream. Green screams enfold my night. I want to be buried in an anonymous crater inside the moon. I want to build miniature golf courses on all the stars. I want to prove that Atlantis was a summer resort for cavemen. I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke played on us by superior beings on a humorous planet. I want to expose heaven as an exclusive sanitarium filled with rich psychopaths who think they can fly. I want to show that the Bible was serialized in a Roman children's magazine. I want to prove that the sun was born when God fell asleep with a lit cigarette tired after all that judging. I want to prove once and for all that I am not crazy.