WEBVTT

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Since I had Bob Kaufman in that
poem, that's a New Orleans poet.

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He's one of Yusef's
muses for wherever

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Yusef comes from as a poet.

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These are one of the
people that he cites.

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And Bob Kaufman is great.

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Bob Kaufman is amazing.

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So here's my sketch of
Bob Kaufman, born in 1925.

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So I'm just telling you
who he is, that's all.

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When Bob Kaufman dies
at age 60 in 1989

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from a condition in
which the liver does not

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live properly due
to long term trauma,

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the ghosts he meets traveling
the road from San Francisco

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back to New Orleans
call him the Buddha Fly

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because he is pajamaed
in a burlap robe

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and holds a quill made of crow
feather in his writing hand

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and a writhing
crow in the other.

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A transient cloud
defecting to God

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while lambasting the fifth
commandment like Noah,

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shipwrecked and gnawing his
nails with his wisdom teeth,

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Kaufman was thin as a skeleton,
transported to the realm

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of symbolic meaning.

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It was the middle of
a triple digit July.

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A gate swung between cafe
excursions and nights

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of smothered rage, spontaneous
revelations exploding

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into Birdland,
saxophone refrains,

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black rain falling on the
snow, the ancient rain falling

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on the maternal from a
distant American sky,

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crackling with eclipses,
commuted bluenesses,

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footpaths hidden
beneath shadows,

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shivers impaled on
slivers of wind.

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And silver traffic impaled
on the nautical sounds

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of weeping and sweating.

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A pregnant tongue
bounced up and down

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like a merchant marine
counting vultures and stars

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from the deck of a sinking ship
in the mouth of Bob Kaufman.

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He wouldn't put
the quill and crow

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down even when the ghost offered
him shade and drinkable rain.

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OK.