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MARLOWE

Marlowe Portrait

POE-TREE MO. OUGHT 2

I come from the bank--Post and Powell--
balancing my booty, my bounty on my hip and
snatched by the window of Border's Books--
oh yes it's poetry month I forgot--
peruse display of this and that and that,
Complete Collected Alice Walker,
Sylvia Plath, Wyston Auden--

And what is this exed out and muddled typescript?
'Out of the rhetoric and secret cackle
of poor human poetry'
with xxxxx and scattered excisions,
'the moral imagination of the weird something
something edit soul of poetry
good to eat a thousand years.'

My god the actual once-blank piece of paper
pounded out by young Allen on a dinosaur
on the 1950's cigarette-burned kitchen table
of some speed-crazed dawn-dreary N.Y. garret,
night fighting through to day in the filthy windows,
bodies scattered round on the bottle-strewn floor--
I do not HOWL but laugh out loud weeping to see it.

 © Marlowe

( New poem. Not published in chapbooks )

John Marlowe PETROGYPH NEXT


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