by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Surrounded by invisible naked ladies
I haunted alleyways of wrecked burgundy.
Listening to Heitor Villa-Lobos’s fantasies.

What I like is starter fluid on Bozo’s grave.

Demand Eternity (but settle for ecstasy).
Malappropiation Strategies, for instants:
Custard’s Last Stand;
20,000 Leaks Under the Sea.

IOUs dripping from the sun’s blind spot.

What kind of fuel am I ?

My arms still brag about holding you up
in night’s watch-repair shop.

Fire lost in your lips I find abandoned.
There are only green lights in Go Town.

by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

November draws its purse strings tight.
A pack of clouds swallows the moon.
My old lamp blinks, its wiring kaput.

Between useless and euphoric, I sleuth
for meaning, meandering from Gramercy
to the river.  Listening to The Shivers . . .

to Robert Kelly lifting scripture off
a mirror.  On Windmill Attack Mode.
Milling around in my grab bag of genes.

At the end, the language we suspend
will shepherd us past midnight’s derrick.
Leaning on eternity like a vagrant.  O,

I’ll still pay for the foolish love I spent
when you were on top of my to-do list

by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Born to rhyme: you all hot for posterity
and me in hot pursuit of your posterior.
Even alone we are not wee.

Japonica spills buttons in prim rows.
Virginia bluebells ring the river path.
Elsewhere freedom fighters flail.

Our hour on the promenade we hover,
only just here but furthering ever
a cascading effort that finds us here.

“So, you want to do it again ?”  Sure.
Practice makes us purr.  Then
black lentils and tarragon for dinner.

Looking underground for what matters.
Time leaves holes to stick our heads in.

by Andrei Codrescu

How do you care for the dead ?
Kaddish.  The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And then year after year Dia de los Muertos.
All Saints’ Day in New Orleans.
My dead, you are watching, no ?
Hard cars, soft bodies, broken hearts.
Jeffrey and Glenn died when the VW hit a tree
on the Russian River village of Monte Rio
in California in 1977 before the internet.
In our dead lies the secret of greatness.
Jeffrey is a great poet still.  Ted Berrigan.
Jim Carroll.  The real marketing machine
of the cosmos is poetry.  The internet
is the shadow of an egret in the clear lake
of eternity, I mean music.
When Jeffrey died our common friend Hunce Voelcker
insisted on reading for forty days the Coleman translation
of the Tibetan Book of the Dead intro by Carl Jung
while I read the Chogyam Trungpa translation
simultaneously, choosing accuracy over beauty
in guiding the soul of our friend through the Bardo.
Coleman, Trungpa, said, got a color wrong, meaning
that the soul might wonder in the wrong direction
because of the mistranslation, reincarnating as a cockroach,
let’s say, instead of the non-Jeffrey he might have escaped in.
I would rather Jeffrey got through the Bardo and did not
reincarnate.
Hunce thought that being a cockroach is preferable to
nothingness.
Hunce also believed that, beauty is superior to accuracy.
He left his money to the American Poetry Academy for a poetry
prize.
Hunce loved Hart Crane but I liked the Scientific American.