It was crazies I wanted. Trees charge me. Remember, if I die, to plug me in a
tree. A wingnut elm who speaks a truth. If I saw my head off, chain me to
oak and charge me with murder. I won’t even need a pillow. But I’ll gash my
head of just to use it as a pillow. Feel good, sleep good. Even if their truth
made less sense than their beards, I burned when they gave it to me (always
on the subway, passing into my hands a flame of roots). The apricot throws
itself to the ground, because they let mountains exist. But wild ones never
told me weather, because whether’s not a shade of truth. I relished the shade
of their beard, withered breeze of their breath, and I was glad when my best
friend asked me to spot him a million bucks to hide from the Feds in a
helicopter ; sad to hear my childhood declare itself the biggest Buddha
flatulating at the center of the universe, then helicopter of a roof; mad when
Nietzsche, terrified of my toilet, filled empties with urine and shaved himself
with a rotor blade; and had a roommate, once, who got fired from a head
shop for excessive Windexing and came home tossing loaves of bread he
rescued from a dumpster. Most souls emit light. But a rare soul’s like the
gleaned worm angling for life; it sucks up all the dirt and churns it into food
until a birdbeak schisms it. I don’t want to grow like them when I grow up,
no sir, don’t have the bells. But as I get older, drunker & more bearded,
maybe the sprigs of chin I tug between my fingers will turn to wings and
spark, whistle, chirp.
Richard Prins