Jack Spicer - Six Poems For Poetry Chicago lyrics

1 “Limon tree very pretty And the limon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon Is impossible to eat” In Riverside we saved the oranges first (by smudging) and left the lemons last to fend for them selves. They didn't usually A no good crop. Smudge-pots Didn't rouse them. The music Is right though. The lemon tree Could branch off into real magic. Each flower in place. We Were sickened by the old lemon. 2 Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble. Which evokes Eliot and then evokes Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of no good. The past around us is deeper than. Present events defy us, the past Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for him. He died in agony. The co*k under the thumb. Rest us as corpses We poets Vain words. For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak) Of good And impossible Dimensions. 3 In the far, fat Vietnamese jungles nothing grows. In Guadacan*l nothing grew but a kind of shrubbery that was like the bar-conversation of your best friend who was not able to talk. 3 Sheets to the wind. No Wind being present. No Lifeboats being present. A jungle Can't use life-boats. Dead From whatever bullets the snipers were. Each Side of themselves. Safe- Ly delivered. 4 The rind (also called the skin) of the lemon is difficult to understand It goes around itself in an oval quite unlike the orange which, as anyone can tell, is a fruit easily to be eaten. It can be crushed in canneries into all sorts of extracts which are still not lemons. Oranges have no such fate. They're pretty much the same as they were. Culls become frozen orange juice. The best oranges are eaten. It's the shape of the lemon, I guess that causes trouble. It's ovalness, it's rind. This is where my love, somehow, stops. 5 A moment's rest. I can't get a moment's rest without sleeping with you. Yet each moment Seems so hard to figure. Clocks Tell time. In elaborate ceremonial they tick the seconds off what was to come. Wake us at six in the morning with messages someone had given them the night before. To pierce the darkness you need a clock that tells good time. Something in the morning to hold on to As one gets craftier in poetry one sees the obvious messages (co*ks for clocks) but one forgets the love that gave them Time. 6 The moment's rest. And the bodies entangled and yet not entangled in sleeping. Could we get Out of our skins and dance? The bedclothes So awry that they seem like two skins. Or all the sorts of skins that we wore, wear (the orgasm), wanted to wear, or would be wearing. So utterly tangled. A bad dream. A moment's rest. The skins All of them Near. I saw the ghost of myself and the ghost of yourself dancing without music. With Out Skin. A good dream. The Moment's rest.