This is a long poem but it's one sentence.
So I'll go by quickly.
This was written after visiting the gay parade in San Francisco
this July or was it--
actually I think it was June.
I was just absolutely astonished by the presence and the power
of the people marching in the parade given
that the devastation of AIDS that
has seared through the community there and I was--
I was just blown away.
And I hope that you'll hear the parade
when it comes in about three-quarters of the way
through the poem.
It's in here.
The setting for this, this is one
of these poems that starts and ends
in the same place like bookends.
And the setting for it is actually a room much like this.
"The Impossible."
"I had to give a great speech to a filled hall,
beginning with a flute sonata, and to recite
from several books only two of which I recognized,
which I accomplished though it took everything out
of me as I tried to hold my posture erect
and failing that, at least look good on the balls of my feet.
This being nearly impossible, I tried
to give the illusion of weightlessness or at the very
least a sense of rapprochement wont with gravity
whereby my head remained light while my heart suffered
and my soul burned.
So that when asked to run, run for all
I was worth which I tell you was not much
by then, because of the pressure to demure to those around me
cajoling and demanding, I fled with a kind of verve
even I did not foresee since I was preoccupied with having
abandoned a project.
Its true only a genius or a madman might have finished
and which I had, frankly, more or less accomplished
by accident, intuition, and a sudden burst of confidence
which shocked even my dearest and succeeded
in reaching the famous Crystal Springs
heretofore thought to be imaginary.
A thing of wonder but without substance,
without substantiation, such blueness and liquidity.
It was unbelievable but true that I
stopped on a dime resisting a personal moment that surely
would have overwhelmed anyone so haunted
and so driven by so many and experienced
what can only be described as a disappointment plain and simple
not because the waters were any less majestic, any less
transparent than rumored, in fact,
they were blue beyond the cerulean of sky
over a south high in the mountains of deepest Earth.
Purpled nearly black; that is, if one thought of the sun ever
going down into such waters.
Sad because I had never been more in love, more
given over to any one person, place, or thing
and all of existence seemed paltry next to such
feeling if one did not count the few stones that uncannily
caught my eye, pebbles I almost smashed out
of a euphoria that overcame and nearly destroyed me.
A taste of heavenly wind swept my body,
tickling my ribs with a fancy singing of spirit,
tempting, perfumed, but for the goddamn six or seven
loosely strewn aforementioned ugly little rocks that buckled
my knees with their gray snaky surface,
pimpled, rough, impossibly connotative;
that is, I saw 1,000 lakes in the landscape
of a bird-shat mossy clump glombed to a crag and bat faces
and bare paws and exoskeletal histories
from beyond time and so on which held me face down,
less recalcitrant than I had ever been, trust me on that,
and ever more eager to obey the longer I picked out lunar hills
and valleys and the more hushed I got between one
ancient, practically moribund,
megaliths and another beamed so to speak from oblivion.
The body of universe opened into a gaping mouth
whose lips mercifully shined with the handiwork of creation
or at least it seemed that way to me.
By now flattened to the cold damp floor, reddened
with the liveliness of movement, and of sweat,
crimson then, and moving, mouthing something, in tongues
but almost immediately my language,
words I once dared to call I grant, you in a dream,
the language of love, which in this case
hasten to particularize itself in the being of a face.
And then the hair and eyes and costume of beatific figures
transsexualized by ritual and political charioteering,
such that I no longer knew myself,
but rather a consortium of likenesses whose cocksureness
is colloquialized as immediately as the words for it are spoken.
A roaring of motorcycles and then hundreds of faceless,
because one face, hermaphroditic moderns
blazed by, upstaging the monochromatic past
with theatrical moves and chartreuses,
white-faced and mascara-ed images, eyebrowless.
And I found myself in full color,
reproduced electronically as it were,
so eroticized as to be unreal.
A diorama overpowering everything else
in common limelight.
Dykes on bikes, fag hags, drag queens, steroidal buffs,
midnight blue Black semi nudes, boy toys,
unzipped sadomasochistic 6 foot tricks.
The semi-erect, the innocent, in gym shorts
and in slips, tuxedos, T-shirts, cut-offs, jeans
impaled at the crotch, godly larger
than life meaning assigned to them.
By messages spelled out on their chests,
silence equals death, et cetera, until so engorged their numbers
blur into a massive energy that finally disperses
into the missions and the tenderloins
from whence they came into the planetary city named
irreverently and made familiar by necessity, sex.
And I passed out onto those innocuous stones.
Trifles I might have missed another day.
Waking to stumble between two destinations, home or on,
knowing I'd forgotten, oh Alcatraz-ed face,
betrayed, abandoned.
Forgotten more than any metaphor provided
because it too is ultimately betrayed and abandoned.
Forgotten life because if this paper face, this alphabet
and these blanks I trusted naturally
like a form of breathing, life I have to return to,
which I made more difficult than walking off
the globe by imagining I had to say a few tired words
into an ear, near empty auditorium,
beginning with a couple of short notes only some of which
I'd actually written."
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS] Did you get the parade?
You got the parade.
OK, you got the parade.