Same Old Shi

White Mountain, Yellow Dragon: Same Old Shi

Wine-drunk, stoned, funky, I'm on top of Poetry Mountain, clicking

screen wall art, searching through the meaningless heaven of a browser,

framed, open, displaying quick tufts of pine and flashing cedar sweeps.

Listening to jazz flute, I crisscrossed a haunted battlefield, twice,

Those dead soldiers don't scare me, and neither do the boatmen's ghosts

or that big yellow dragon, uncoiled—right fucking there!—brush-stroking

through cyber-clouds of marijuana mist. Oh how my mountain floats,

like a signal smoked from tower to tower along the Great Wall.

It floats and sinks and I come down: I become a white sandhill crane,

singing in the wet swamp below, then a dumb duck winging his way

back to some bros down the chain, and next I'm the clouds' pimp (the wind),

sending clouds around and around my white mountain, circulating

in a digital cluster, until that yellow dragon emerges,

and at this instant I feel that maybe I am actually scared,

terrified of my innermost propensities and tensions.

Wow, now my emotional life hits the landscape like a firebird,

a red phoenix, or, hell, a dragon.  My dragon humps the yellow one,

dragon-on-dragon action. Our sex smells like a burnt peach waffle.

Willows wash our crevices. The new moon dries us. The horizon—

Western, pink, overweight, so goddamn Beyond—won't notice our sex. 

When I wrote this poem, I wrote it under-the-influence of the song I posted below.  When you think about it, shi is that "Funk Underneath," sisters and brothers!  This is what I mean in my poem by "jazz flute."