I read a funny poem.
I want to dedicate this poem to my old friend, George Shelton.
This is a poem I feel that--
of course, certain subjects become current.
The rock and roll poem is already passé.
I'll read one of them later.
There's just a genre of rock and roll poems,
people yearning nostalgically to recover their lost
youth in the '60s and the Age of Aquarius,
fringed vests, so forth and so on.
Really pathetic enactments.
I feel like the kung fu poem is just beginning to be written.
And I'm a pioneer in that territory.
The first line of this-- this is sort of analogy
too, a generational elegy.
And the first line of the poem is also the title of the poem.
"Fred Had Watched a Lot of Kung Fu Episodes."
So when the policeman asked to see his driver's license,
he said, does the wind need permission
from the hedgehog to blow?
Which resulted in a search of the car, which
miraculously yielded nothing since Fred had swallowed all
the mescaline already and was just beginning
to fall in love with the bushy caterpillar
eyebrows of the officer in question.
In those days, we could identify the fingerprints
on a guitar string by the third note
of the song, broadcast from the window of a passing car.
But we couldn't tell the difference
between a personal disaster and "having an experience."
So Fred thought being locked up for the night was kind of fun,
with the graffiti on the drunk tank wall chattering
in Mandarin and the sentient cockroaches coming out
to visit in triplicate.
Back then, it wasn't a question of pain or pleasure.
It wasn't a question of getting to the top then trying
not to fall at any cost.
It was a question of staying tuned in,
one episode at a time, said Fred to himself
as he walked home the next morning
under the spreading lotus trees on Walnut Street.
feeling Oriental.
[APPLAUSE]
Since I wrote that poem, I've read several other kung fu
poems.
It's entering either, depending on how
you look at it, the marketplace or our aesthetic province.