This is called "Shield of Moon Dust."
And I heard this tale on the radio,
and a guy was talking about blowing up the moon
to protect us from UV rays, because
of the depletion of the ozone layer.
[LAUGHTER]
And after all, blowing up moon would be
like blowing up a huge cliche.
So there's--
[LAUGHTER]
But there's all those little, you know,
tidal squirming things.
That should be [INAUDIBLE].
So I think it's a bad idea.
[LAUGHTER]
I just want to go on record here.
[LAUGHTER]
There are people who think I'm not a political poet.
[LAUGHTER]
"Shield of Moon Dust."
"Until your name is called, try a magazine.
The number of interests represented
is truly extraordinary--
canapé erection, gall bladder massage, goat milking,
the misfired and nullified glissandi of yesteryear,
DH Lawrence who was able to write horribly
and magnificently in the same sentence.
But it is the bizarreness of his ideas re:
the dark force emanating from a man's buttocks
that makes him a modernist although he's
no Ezra Pound who wrote the brain was a wad of sperm.
Both were drawn towards uniformed men marching
in formation which is one reasons they weren't
surrealists, the surrealists being known
for alternating currents beside the dented metals of the sea.
All non-migrating butterflies are surrealists,
ditto third graders.
If the fox of your heart keeps biting the eye of your hand,
you too are a surrealist.
Beauty everywhere, take off your clothes!
You're not wearing much anyway.
I'm sorry my signal keeps breaking up,
the voltage soused, a wasp in its wine
but it wasn't meant to last forever,
crucial fluidity of likelihoods sung in the excitable void.
In the animal cell, excitability begins
in the mitochondria which, singularly among organelles,
has its own DNA.
DNA is surreal because a fair amount of it
is gibberish, otiose code for no known amino
and as such purely artistic.
A wren of nonsense passes through us.
Nothing like this has happened before so much it almost
can't happen once.
In common parlance, surreal means a flair of irony,
silliness, inept, overdone, criminal,
having stupendous sex organs like the Eiffel Tower,
being dead, being chased, miscolored, love-gorged,
love-gored, abstract expressionist, New York School,
surprised by snow, its monomaniacal hush, any hoax.
The word modernist means nothing.
The rain falls in the guillotine of your glance--
forever!
Silver corridors connect our dreams--
forever!
What can surpass the bounty of this moment?
Here comes the next.
The doctor will see you now."