The New San Francisco Poetry Underground:
Ed Bowers

CHANNELING CHARLIE PARKER

A POEM

THAT IS NOT UP TO MY STANDARDS

BECAUSE I AM

LISTENING TO SARAH VAGHN

AND NOBODY

IS UP TO

HER

STANDARDS

Death, I want to be my self.  I am vain.

So I’m looking for something to get me high.

Speed freaks are shoving staple guns in their heads.

Junkies are on vacation in an ocean of saxophones playing for sharks.

Census takers take statistics that come inside a whore’s mouth.

I want to get high and that does not include this.

When I run out of heroin,

I am not glamorous.

I am scary like when you were a kid and couldn’t sleep at night.

I am the future of money.

When I run out of music,

I am a fly filled with insecticide.

Give me money.  I’m dying of a broken heart inside my mother who spoiled me.

There’s too many of you and too little of me.

I just want to get high.

I am a hole in which I dance the dance of death.

Can your hole tell me how to dance forever?

No.

Once I was inside you and you were inside me.

That was the ancient innocence where words were music and silence was God.

There is no love now because now is dead.

Chemicals have won.

I desperately need to get high.

Be silent.

The Moon is full.

Don’t listen to me.

Only ancient poets can translate

The Moon.

I am a musician without the ability to remember the night I pleasured you.

No one can translate a whore’s need to get high.

There are big people and little people.  I hurt the little and I hurt the big.  I am a bug.

I’m sorry.

I want to get high.

I’m a tape loop.

Play me again.

Without me

The Universe would not exist any longer than a cigarette.

I was once famous.

My advice is never bow to an idol.

I need to get high, forgive me.

When you hated me I was born more intelligent than you and

We were both perfect.

Fuck it.  I’m crazy.  Your crimes go down in my name.  I’m not Jesus.

I want to get high.

There is nothing

Outside you

Making you different

Than

Me.

Place no blame.  I am a Chinese Arab Jew.

I’m crazy.

I want to go beyond.

I don’t talk much because words are facts and I need to make a living.

I’m psychotic because of trying to be you.

Getting high is my only option.

I am more than an only and less than an is.

My mission is to take God’s plan apart like a watch
Then pretend to be too stupid to put it together again.

Watch out for me.

I just want to get high.

Get out!

This is the place where solos stop in the middle of a breakdown.

Let me get high!

My silence is a dollar store near you.

The death under my balcony

Is laughing.

Chemical ideas have subjugated ideals.

Words are hypnotic.

Music is dead.

The human race is as annoying as a fly dying in my room while I overdose. 

I wrote it off at the end.

Now I only need to get high.

Who are you, by the way?

Bastard beat bitch.

Bitch beat bastard.

Is this the way?

I get high.

I hear voices.

I hear people.

I see things.

People who get high are normal.

Currently only a handful of musicians exist on Planet Earth.

The rest are posing for pharmaceutical advertisements.

Do not make noise outside my tomb.

I want to get high.

Do not fear silence.

It is dead musicians.

I am a snake now.

The snake is alive.

It will swallow you.

I am history.

I want to get high.

Hello, lover.

Are you still listening to me?

See you again.

I need to get high.

Bye, bye.