Poem for Jimi Hendrix
Laid back in the tempest, herald of the night’s other darkness and its wishes, you remain light’s incantation, solar high, muse-tormented, thundercloud sent. Where the crowd walks by, a bored unhappy choir, we are blessed in a prism of sound: you transpose creation while the world kills grace. There is nothing but dying. If death too is nothing, let cyclone blues congeal beneath a sky of no human domain. Let hunger to extend the sun calm the demons, rage and war, with chords gold-fisted and melting on newborn skin. In a cycle of twenty-seven winters, you, shy mortal, have used maps for sails and walked a nuclear highway no bluesmen have seen. Then used without love, in the love generation, you have drowned, a legend, in vomit of your sleep. (from the book 'Routes') |
