MEIN KAMPF

“Gary Snyder lives in the country. He wakes up in the morning and listens to birds. We live in the city.”

– Kathleen Wood

all i want to do is

make poetry famous

ali i want to do is

burn my initials into the sun

all i want do do is

read poetry from the middle of a

burning building

standing in the fast lane of the

freeway

falling from the top of the

Empire State Building

the literary world

sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck

than Gary Snyder

I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell

than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather

sell arms to the Martians

than wait sullenly for a

letter from some diseased clown with a

three-piece mind

telling me that I’ve won a

bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses

for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be

hated

by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and

get headaches

I want people to hear my poetry and

vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and

weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,

eat their television sets, beat each other to death with

swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on

someone else’s money

this ain’t no party

this ain’t no disco

this ain’t no foolin’ a

grab-bag of

clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and

gracious theories about

how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a

machine gun

this ain’t no

genteel evening over

cappuccino and bullshit

this ain’t no life-affirming

our days have meaning

as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and

fall desperately in love

this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down

wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about

the broken rainbow

it is a carnival of dread

it is a savage sideshow

about to move to the main arena

it is terror and wild beauty

walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road

as missiles scream, while a

sky the color of arterial blood

blinks on and off

like the lights on Broadway

after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS

I come not to bury poetry

but to blow it up

not to dandle it on my knee

like a retarded child with

beautiful eyes

but

throw it off a cliff into

icy seas and

see if the the motherfucker can

swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing

surely we need it

but, my friends…

there is so much to hate These Days

that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder

a chip as big as the Ritz

and heavier than

all the bills I’ll never pay

because they’re after us

they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets

and breakfast cereals that

lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful

we get politicians who think

starting World War III

would be a good career move

we got beautiful women

with eyes like wet stones

peering out at us from the pages of

glassy magazines

promising that they’ll

fuck us till we shoot blood

if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives

I’ve got mine

I wish

I had known about David Lerner about fifteen years ago. That kind of knowledge probably wouldn’t have changed his life or mine but it would’ve given me the privilege of knowing his work while it was coming out and he was alive. THE LAST FIVE MILES TO GRACE, Zeitgeist Press, 2005, with a Foreword by Bruce Isaacson, brings together much if not all of Lerner’s published work. While David Lerner was closely associated with the Café Babar poets, the Poesy Fall 2005 issue is devoted to the Babarians, Lerner could have and most certainly would have been a major poet anywhere in this country, he was that good. At his electric genius best, Lerner could write as well as the best of them. He had a line that could suck the power right out of thin air and shove it into a high voltage poem. The only thing I can say is that most of the poems in LAST FIVE MILES work off some kind of huge duende, some cracked, damaged but still functioning power circuit that only a few poets ever tap into. The two poems that really work for me are The Future Task Of Language and Mein Kampf. “the future task of language/is to/drive a cherry-red Mercedes Benz/into the heart of hell/and place a bet on God.” You just gotta love that line. If you have any pretensions about being a poet, any kind of poet at all, you gotta love that line. And, this from MEIN KAMPF. “how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a/machine gun.” It doesn’t matter if you call Lerner a Café Babar poet, a Baby Beat, or what. What he absolutely was, was, he was truly a major poet and a natural Outlaw. Todd Moore

Thanks

to Bruce Isaacson for the permit of publishing David Lerner’s poem on OutlawPoetryCom.



MEIN KAMPF

by David Lerner appears in The Last Five Miles to Grace and I Want a New Gun, as well as The Graceful Arc of a Missile. All these books are available via our THE SHOP page here… or just click on the following covers. THANKS !



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