I was miserable, of course for a I was seventeen,
And so I swung into action and wrote a poem
And it was miserable for that was how I
Thought
Poetry worked: you digested experience
And shat
Literature. It was 1960 at the Showplace long
Since
Defunct, on West 4th., and I sat at the bar,
Casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
The kid in the city, big ears like a puppy
And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
Other things, but they were wrong as it happened
So I made him look at the poem
“There’s a lot of that going around, ” he said
And Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
Amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought
Bad poems were dangerous ,the way some
Poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot
To destroy sandlots everywhere
So that the same could
Be saved from children later
That night he fired the pianist in mid-number
And then flurried him from the stand.
“We’ve suffers a diminuedo in personal, ”
He explained ,and the band played on.
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