The title is an ungraceful translation of a graceful song that exemplifies how I feel right now. It's spring, and I'm gloriously happy, and the world is a good place. There is a bit of a haze around my head. I've started reading more Ferlinghetti, and although I've been chided by a cocksure friend that I act like I discovered him, I can't hide my rabid enthusiasm. Perhaps rabid isn't quite the word, but nevertheless:
A Coney Island of the Mind
# 10
I have not lain with beauty all my life
telling over to myself
its most rife charms
I have not lain with beauty all my life
and lied with it as well
telling over to myself
how beauty never dies
but lies apart
among the aborigines of art
and far above the battlefields
of love
It is above all that
oh yes
It sits upon the choicest of
Church seats
up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
And they have lain with beauty
all their lives
And they have fed on honeydew
and drunk the wines of Paradise
so that they know exactly how
a thing of beauty is a joy
forever and forever
and how it never never
quite can fade
into a money-losing nothingness
Oh no I have not lain
on Beauty Rests like this
afraid to rise at night
for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made
Yet I have slept with beauty
in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
with beauty in my bed
and so spilled out another poem or two
and so spilled out another poem or two
upon the Bosch-like world
Bosch-like. What a thought.
I feel indescribable.
