I
CHRYSALIS
A while back
I went to sleep
in a sleeping bag
when it got too cold
and we hadn't yet fired up
the wood burner in the garage
but thing is, I still go to bed
inside that sleeping bag,
which hitherto was restricted
to mountain hikes
Yes, I slip into my bag
on the deck of The Great Ship of Dreams
in the bedroom upstairs,
not anymore to counter arctic temperatures
in a poorly insulated house,
but because it feels nice, tucked in, cosy,
putting me in a chrysalis mood,
about to spread my Peter Pan wings
and sail off
like a rising thought, a butterfly,
an osprey or the Moon that shines
like Anna's smartphone
in the rise-and-shines
of bitterly early pre-dawns
when I reach for Nanao Sakaki's
revered Break The Mirror,
which recently hit my mailbox
via an extra fee for the Swedish customs,
hailed by Gary Snyder's preface,
but which in fact turned out quite bland;
not the least remarkable,
the man proved just a pretentious fake,
sustained by the Americans' reverence
for Zen bums,
even getting Snyder on the bandwagon,
in a manner similar to the blown-out-of-proportions
reputation
of enfant terrible La Monte Young,
all too hailed by Terry Riley
in his leaflet presentation of The Well-Tuned Piano,
when in fact Young's grand piece may well be
a work of fundamental research,
but never a composition per se,
though all those ridiculously fancy names
of all the sections
may blind some quasi disciples
Don't forget the grandest example
of exemplary words with no substance
that were ever spoken;
Jesus' purple prose about God,
that, of course, simply was a means
of the Male Chauvinist Mid Eastern Pigs
of those days
to retain their power
over contemporaries, especially women,
eagerly applied by weak males until this day
Don't trust anyone!
”Don't follow leaders,
watch your parking meters!”
II
CONTEMPORANEITY
I left a day out
of my exercise notebook,
leaving me
with the wrong date
for today
I couldn't figure it out
out of time
lost in the calendar
adrift
but worked it out
feverishly
with Anna in bed,
when we both needed
to go to sleep
Now I'm contemporary,
on time,
I'm back,
I'm here, I think
III
A STEP FURTHER
I'm known
to take things a teeny bit further,
not stopping at the Common Sense sign,
which is why I married the girl behind me
in line for coffee
at the Greyhound rest stop at Breezewood,
Pennsylvania,
bringing me into a Jewish family in Maryland
and why I founded Sonoloco Record Reviews,
which persuaded Karlheinz Stockhausen
to reach into his pocket
to pay my trips to Kürten
and a hotel room there,
four consecutive summers
which also made me write my mountain stories
that were eventually read by a mountain hiker called Anna,
whom I chanced upon below Mount Nallo in Lapland
and whose photograph I unabashedly asked to take,
her reading habits unbeknownst to me at the time,
now having me swing low on night trains
'tween my southern retreat and my northern habitat,
since eleven years
and then to call this happenstance note a poem,
very possibly to be performed
on a post-covid stage
in some kind of future,
should I remain a live being