Would you wear my eyes?

At Poetic Outlaws:

Would You Wear My Eyes?

By: Erik Rittenberry

Every time I open my big mouth

I put my soul in it.

It takes so much to be nothing,

to shroud the mind’s eye

from the gaudy theater

of the head.

Hey subscribers, it’s Friday and I feel like sharing a poem with you all from one of my all-time favorite Beat Poets — the great Bob Kaufman.

Kaufman was an American poet, a street poet, a jazz poet, “a poet of the people.” He wasn’t mainstream and unfortunately (or fortunately) he never captured worldwide notoriety like his contemporaries Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Gary Snyder.

He was a poet who preferred the hidden shadows of the city over the seduction of fame and fortune.

Kaufman grew up in New Orleans reading Henry James, Proust, Melville, Flaubert, and many others. At 18, he became a laborer and then joined the Merchant Marine. It was at this time during the Eisenhower years that the Beat literary movement slithered out of the arid American soil of conventionality and monotony.

The Beat poets were young spiritual renegades on a quest for the deeper meaning of it all. Their hyperbolic writings and wild antics sparked that infamous movement of what sociologists labeled “the counter-culture”— that youthful explosion of art, music, sex, psychedelics, and rebellion.

These poets and writers were in defiance against, in the words of Kerouac, “the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…”

There they were — Walt Whitman’s illegitimate children, poetic bohemians, metaphysical dissidents, ramblin’ around the country in complete defiance of the banal, television-watchin’, materialistic charade of a lifestyle that was sweeping across the nation.

It was around this time that Kaufman headed to San Fran where he met the king of the Beats himself, Jack Kerouac. Shortly after the encounter, Kaufman reinvented himself as a poet, spiritually and in the flesh. He refused to work pointless jobs and accepted the inevitable poverty and hardships that came with pursuing the arts.

He once wrote: “I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

Poetry was it for him, his “golden eternity,” and he would do it with nothing to fall back on. He was arrested numerous times, locked up and beaten, and then spit back onto the cold streets of the city. And he still wrote. Relentlessly.

During the times that he wasn’t in jail, you might find Kaufman on any given day standing on the tables in some hipster café or on some midnight corner under a lamplight reciting his own poetry for any and everyone to hear.

Bob Kaufman was a voyager, a madman with a moonburnt soul, a “wanderer of the heart, wanderer of star worlds, off to a million tomorrows.” As he once wrote:

When I die,

I won’t stay

Dead.

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do. You can find it in the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Would You Wear My Eyes?

My body is a torn mattress,

Disheveled throbbing place

For the comings and goings

Of loveless transients.

The whole of me

Is an unfurnished room

Filled with dank breath

Escaping in gasps to nowhere.

Before completely objective mirrors

I have shot myself with my eyes,

But death refused my advances.

I have walked on my walls each night

Through strange landscapes in my head.

I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,

Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.

My face is covered with maps of dead nations;

My hair is littered with drying ragweed.

Bitter raisins drip haphazardly from my nostrils

While schools of glowing minnows swim from my mouth.

The nipples of my breasts are sun-browned cockleburrs;

Long-forgotten Indian tribes fight battles on my chest

Unaware of the sunken ships rotting in my stomach.

My legs are charred remains of burned cypress trees;

My feet are covered with moss from bayous, flowing

across my floor.

I can’t go out anymore.

I shall sit on my ceiling.

Would you wear my eyes?

Sloan Bashinsky

Although it wasn't much fun, and it was because I ran out of money, I lived on and off the street for several years, and during that time I sometimes slept in a tent or vehicle, but mostly it was on the ground and sometimes in the front lobby of a police station. Sometimes I stayed nights in homeless shelters, sometimes I stayed in the homes of friends. Sometimes I was accused of being homeless on purpose, or I was researching a book. I never wanted to disappear and never be heard, and often I was quite noisy via things I wrote, first by email, then a blog, and things I said at city and county government meetings and in churches. I was always out of the box; I claimed much of what I said or wrote was inspired by angels known in the Bible, who had and still were turning me every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out. Some really jolting to me poetry leaped out of me during that time, but most of the poetry had come earlier and some came later, when I was living inside. I think the core of actually living is, we engage what comes our way, the best we can, and sometimes we simply let it pass by or through us, and we keep on going, like stranger than fiction, or strangers in a strange land, which was a really important novel by Robert Heinlein.

Meanwhile, at Facebook:

Jim

Why do news idiots keep calling SSI and Medicare entitlements.....

Laura

So they can convince you that your $$ is actually their$$..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura because we are entitled to get what we bought?

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky no!!according to the government..you didn't "buy" anything..it's an allotment being bestowed upon you at their discretion..so we should all be grateful..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Nobody from the government ever told me that. In fact, I did pay for it with US dollars. From all I hear around and see online and on TV, it's the Republicans that want to take away what I bought. So, my suggestion to them is, o, my suggestion to them is, they take it away from Republicans, MAGAs, Libertarians and anyone else who is on Social Security who wants to take away what I bought.

Am now reminded of back when Alabama's hospitals were full of Covid-19 patients, who had declined to be vaccinated, people with serious medical problems, such as heart attack, stroke, could not. get into those hospitals. When President Trump came to Alabama during that time and urged his followers in Cullman, Alabama to get vaccinated, they booted him. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a very conservative Republican, finally broke ranks and urged the unvaccinated people in Alabama to get vaccinated. I took up saying posting online that people who declined to get vaccinated and hen caught Covid-19 should not be allowed into hospitals that receive federal funding. I was accused of wanting people to die. I replied that it was people who didn't get vaccinated that wanted to die, and so let them die and leave hospitals for people who want to live.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky yeah, I get angry when government talks about my social security being an "entitlement". That's my money! I think if I choose I should be able to get a lump sum and any interest accumulated. My heirs should be entitled to it upon my death.Instead it's now become the largest "tax" ever levied on us. Guess they need to get the $$ from somewhere to redistribute.

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura I never looked at my Social Security as an asset that passed on to my heirs. I viewed it as something to help me get by financially (the monthly payments) and medically (Medicare and Medicaid. If I had a wife, then she should get it after I croaked. But I don't have a wife, so it ends when I die, if the right side of the American political-religious spectrum don't take it away sooner. Some of them want to abolish the IRS and the federal income tax, and leave taxation to the states. Imagine what would happen church coffers, if the federal income tax deduction for gifts to churches was eliminated. 

 

W/hen I was in Costa Rica in 2000, I needed medical attention and it was provided for free. When I told that to people when I was back in America, they went off on some kind of rant against socialism, or they had something to say against free medical treatment. I told them the reason Costa Rica could do that was it didn't have a huge national military to pay for. The last time the American military perhaps defended me was when I was a tot during World War II.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky Lyndon Johnson used it as a trove of untapped resources..saw a huge amount of our $$ ready to be spent (redistributed). I would be better served if I had been able to keep that huge chunk every paycheck. How about the many who have no dependents and die before receiving any SSI "benefits"? Who gets that $$?...uncle sam..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Yes, after last replying to you, I realized I had not included our dependents, especially minor children. 

 

I didn't know about President Johnson, perhaps he inspired today's Republicans to follow suit?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com