PETER LEON

Many years ago I stood like a child on the cobblestone street where at this time my sweetheart sits upon a park bench with a piece of fresh fruit the love intended for old and ailing volunteers picking up trash to maintain a sense of beauty.
In the shadow of Munster Ulm.
The fact is not only were the names of the soldiers on plaques upon the wall but...now
getthis...it shadowed a monument in stone for the house where Albert Einstein once stood firm yet if one closes their eyes they can feel the infinite world spinning in a crash cross with the silent crayon valentine of one girl's prevented climb of the single file tower of German claustrophobia.

I once lay low inside one of my brother's 2 kayaks.
My brother explained the waters were 900 feet beneath our kayaks.
I tightened up my life jacket.
We were out there in Puget Sound as we lay our bait and hook.
Time went by long enough to acquire a Northern California tan.

And then, just as we're just about to call it quits Hap reeled a beautiful rock fish.
And I looked into this fish's eyes and I saw terror.
Hap takes out his buck knife and (after explaining to me that this is the most humane manner of putting out the aquatic traveler) he slit its gills.
The next day we were invited out for a cookout and Hap brought this prisoner bone bad.
Prisoner?
Anyway it was captured in Puget Sound.
And... it sure was a tasty roast.

And that was my still water experiment.
Now I'm a vegetarian...I swear...I...in my autumn best... I'm a vegetarian.
Now I'm in the insane asylum with an old New York Times.
I sit upon my 15th century rat infested mattress.
Filthy mattress with no old stained linen.
And the idiot doctor shakes my hand and asks how I was and then walks away without listening for my desperate reply.

So anyhow, stays in the hospital have increased several times over.
But on that day I was released by the good grace of God.
And the truth was I was still very, very ill.
Took a taxi to the airport
And I sit looking out the window of an airplane.
Got a good Northern California tan.
And I'm flying to a desert in Nevada.
But the medicine man Rolling Thunder was not there.
He was away in a San Francisco hospital staying with his wife who was ill from US Army blankets infected with small pox she received as a child.
The virus stays dormant in the spine for a lifetime and eventually re-emerges and strikes like lightning.
So in the morning the Native American woman rode her bicycle around the village awaking everybody to gather around the fires of dawn in the quietness of first light.

I have read the books.
I... tended my garden.
I wrote the poems for the old and outmoded Dewey Decimal Midnight from a young boy's Universe.
But I never became an Indian.
Not in the Sweat lodge.
Not in the shadow of Mount Shasta.
And definitely not when the medicine man worked his medicine on me.
So I lie quietly upon the hospital mattress.
Smoking a cigarette and carefully tearing up the New York Times article by article.
Line by line.
And in a way... I had infinitely redefined the morning language of subscription.

"I'LL GLADLY PAY YOU TUESDAY FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY"*

I committed suicide by sunbathing during the Sabbath at a Mac Donald's.
Various obituaries upon the the hamburgers from the blindfolded rabbi.
I sleep with a newspaper over my face.
A radio with the obituaries and a cold cigarette in my mouth.
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."*
And so I sleep today out of the mid-day sun.
All wrapped up in a blanket...
Like a child in the long run with poisonous food.
Sugar from the Egyptian Nile.
Fat from The Kings of Babylonia.
And me?
I sit sleeping before the hospital television.
A chocolate bar in my hand...partially wrapped.
And somewhat unwrapped.

I sit there awakening and thoroughly picking my nose.
Too many miles on The Greyhound.
Lost in the enormous fields in the chilling fog of childhood.
Where a room full of monkeys sit reading the newspapers from around the world.
And I?
I have the electrodes from the electric chair to remind me of a sundown full of poetry.
I am the false Messiah.
Condemned to watching television designed from one less day than forever.
I am the child of God.
I stand before the drugstore with a toothpick in my mouth.
A folded newspaper with a million miles to eternity.
Drinking an ice cold coke and winking at a young lady.
But I'm James Dean in my best movie star jackets.
A cigarette lost forever.
A transistor radio in my hand.
"I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."*
Where 60's are properly tucked in by unemployed nurses trying to make everything right for the soda fountain jerk and an empty candy machine in a sunlit afternoon.
The Goodyear blimp floats on by with all the screaming children of an outdated century.

I sit before the hospital television catatonic wrapped thoroughly with museum laundry in the view of 18th century publications and the Queen's breakfast on a tray.
I sit in this sanitarium with a melting Hershey Bar...a 1937 NAZI Radio broadcasting a Russian winter inside an old drugstore where my great-grandfather sleeps beside the coke machine.
I sit in my cotton hospital pajamas below the historical sun which floods the inner brain hydrogen bomb proof locked asylum with all the love of every generation from which I am descended or at least on the same paper route from my old childhood.