“For a long time I’ve wanted to turn the sound of the drum into a word, but I’ve been too busy drumming.”
- a
conga drummer in
Beat leaves the beatless
behind:
Can’t dance?
Get off the floor.
Poems listen as stingily. The drum, rhyme,
Codes demonic
Like the drunk to his wine.
The drummer is a mummy, listening a thousand years
apart
From the parties after the
song.
The girls that make lips of feet
Watch the death-face, concentrate,
Of the drummer, and his spasm glance,
Suddenly knows you, his upper wetted lip,
His bones that tighten on his flesh,
His mermaid lobe,
Watch him breath through his neck,
His calves, his short strong Achilles’ heel,
His bee and hummingbird wrist,
The gavel silence he fingers,
His long wood swords, his fetal
Curl when a thousand lips on a cymbal
Lose him, and he has gone too far,
Lost the beat,
And he goes laughing through his wrist
And fingers and he is meeting
The skin of animals with a
worn thumb.
He bows a head.
Lost the beat.
But!
Up like cocks to the new girl, and the new girl,
Nipples and new beat.
Three drummers, one on toms-toms
Keeping straight as railroad ties,
The other on a snare
Ghost-noting like the fumes from a pond,
And a third on a kick, 22-inch thick, skin
That brings death to jazz like the allergic to wool
And they beat, beat, beat –
Sound of fall at first, towers made of
Hollow, coconuts, the murmur
Of slapped asses, fields of the foot
On concrete, mangers
Stomped with unmilked
cows,
Pews of the religious letting out,
The long blood of insomniac ears,
The pound of ice in warm drinks,
The famed tread of Paul Bunyan,
The girl falling into bed, the phone
Slapping down, the full beer
Of the bar after cheers,
The pimple popping, the sound of cum
Through cock-mouth, all at enormously
Amplified
And the small curdle of milk
Going bad,
The sound of spit in Jesus hands healing,
The red cones on prohibited streets of
Sucking air,
The girl plucking underwear,
Pop and pop –
All drums lick us when we sleep.
Hail to him who can play us
Without hurting. Hail to the butt-bongo fiesta
Of Howard Stern, where the
men played their girls.
Hail to the foot-taps in the gardens of summer,
When men are too nervous to
approach the girls.
Hail to the heartbeat heard at four in the morning
After love as violent as
murder.
-30-