Ain't nothing popping about pop culture to a man
grew up reading books and found
a worn copy of Walker Percy's Lancelot
in the Book Nook at age sixteen, dollar
fifty, real angry, got the sin bug just in time to find
a coverless paperback of Steppenwolf,
Herman Hesse's German existentialist apology,
learning how to recognize a freak
in the basement of the Hawley Public Library,
twenty-five cents at age seventeen,
then came across a book sale on the
campus of a college of Liberal Arts
another quarter, a fresh edition of
Immortality at eighteen years,
translated from Milan Kundera's French original,
figuring out the feminine physical,
figuring out it's not that difficult,
figuring out that giving joy might mean
never having none for himself,
eight quarters, three books, two dollars, one whole,
one man raised on dangerous literature,
and never did they ask
what keeps his ears apart.
I sometimes wonder how Daedalus would have felt when he sat in the temple at Sicily, after watching Icarus plummet to the ground with wings of wax...somehow this reminded me of that. It seems to me that with waxen fragments all around him, and his arms splayed about as if in flight, what kept his body above land would be pretty obvious; what would be of more interest is how close he got to the Sun. But perhaps that is the problem of the desire to write poetry. I don't know; it doesn't stop me writing it. :-)
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