Jones and Nyro approached lyrics from the standpoint
of the streets
As overheard by the ghost captain of riverboat sails,
which spooked her,
And the choir seemed somehow to offer food,
quite confusing
for a cool cat
This mission burning down thing, in the southern wing
of confederate rock n roll history,
Wee hee hee hee sal on the other hand
of the white white boy's school
would be catnip
To go on a tightrope with impeccable poise
like the ghost in our catnap.
She bailed at Monterey, thought herself too fat,
didn't perform again until 1971, but she did,
Holy shit, Poverty Train, to half of America's high schoolers
in their CIA-sponsored communal acid bath.
Clearly the hippies were not ready
for a blue ray starseed
Who needed, at 19 years old, a 7th dimension to cover her songs!
Who could twirl every carnival wheel within wheel til it popped,
like a Russian savant reassembles a clock,
refusing to settle for the real to feel
or any better place than dismal bliss,
refusing to accept any fear in fact
at the Stoney End of all sin-based redemptions
that prophecy a different morning,
Who admitted to every conceivable sin in her songs
yet each one was a mystical prayer
in the shadow that all light reaches for,
the lunar nigro,
for art is in those shadows,
The eclipse observed thus pulled into creation.
The Spanish call it duende.
We call it the blues.
There's that point where time and space are violated
and cease to be.
Time stops and space dissolves to one point
of eternal consciousness
mind goes on
in Bach's Heisenberg uncertainty variations
in the eternity ward
until a question comes again
To ground me into time and space, from an eagle,
who says it is the only one:
are you free or enslaved?
Poison, it appears, is not written in the stars,
Blue Orpheus was ...
The choice is always ours
to attach or not,
as a regular ritual
like [fill in the blank].
