McMurphy

I make a number of references not everyone will know, mostly to do with Ken Kesey and his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

If you haven’t read that book lately, check out this little video I made where I fill in the blanks.

McMurphy

i

When Chief Bromden escaped through
that mess of mangled glass and metal,
maybe he loped out across the plains
of the Oregon night,
unpausing forever,
until
he came upon
a city glittering sharp
against a royal sky,

and met a girl, who
with a sudden violent sweetness
loved
the hugeness of
his pulverized soul,

and they were happy
in a one bedroom through whose
beaded door he could hardly squeeze
his immense, sobbing shoulders.

ii

Maybe when Kesey himself
zigzagged brilliant with acid out
onto PCH, eighty-sixed from some
leaden congregation of sexless meditators,

he spied a redwood that stopped him
like a hollow point— Noble, gnarled immensity—

and was privy then,
Old Kesey was, out there
in the savage California night,
a night shredded by the talons
of ravenous owls,
to an aliveness so transparent,
Jerusalem burning
from every twig,
so that even though he could never thereafter
recall any of this,
nevertheless that moment
was sufficient to justify
the entire tale of
America, of culture,
of men,
and of apes.

iii

America, your floor is tiled with
extinct suns. The cracks in our
scorched heels know,
even when
we
stay blind.

The very hymn we chant soars seaward
already dropping like a starved pelican,
consumed by beasts no
human eye will ever see,
and no Nemo comes
for us in the rout,

but the whole kingdom will buckle
under the heat of a
thousand tons of jet fuel,
and nothing to stop it,
mere anarchy loosed upon a world
already mad—

America,
Child of Guineamen and
Wounded Knee,
headwaters of Eliot and
rock ‘n roll—
will we even know it
when you go?

Or will we be so scrabbling for bitcoins in the
viscera of our gutted portfolios,
so deafened in the killing fields of Twitter,

that you fade out gauzed in silence,
a lone junkie in a Bleeker Street hotel?

iv

But maybe
somewhere in the West,
curled in the rays
of our final sunset,
a cicada will sing
through the redness,
and his humid tune
will tell

that although we cannot
beat back the twilight,
nevertheless some final accounting
will tally the light
we shone, and find
that we were good.
There was war,
but there was song;
Ratched’s firing squad eyes fanned out
before the broken inmate,

But there was McMurphy,

whose laugh cannonballs forever down the hallways of the dead ward,
whose swagger dynamites the hallways of the dead,

McMurphy,
murdered but carved
into some un-lost
wall of time:

you, McMurphy,

the unpulverized soul

of America—