Jump to Comments

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 !

some related articles are listed below:

1. zeitgeist Zeitgeist Press started in 1986 to publish work from a group of poets generating tremendous heat at the Cafe Babar readings in San Francisco. It was originally a collective more than a traditionally structured press, which explains both the press strengths and weaknesses. All the way back to the late 1950s North Beach Coffee Gallery, there was a Thursday night open reading in San Francisco. This community spawned some incredible poets– Bob Kaufman, Richard Brautigan, Jack Micheline. Other top poets of the era passed through as well– Diane di Prima, Ginsberg first drafted Howl at a cubbyhole in North...