Dharma Bumming/ More Of The Dharma

- Dharma Bumming -
- From Tales of Cafe Apollinaire -
by Gordon Coombes

At Café Apollinaire William Burroughs recites

newly composed passages

of visions of madness

of drug induced side-tracks distractions

of heroine & morphine of speed

paranoia & distortions

of time & space

of thoughts jumbled about

in his mental stew

an enigma a mystery

to be unraveled

to enter into it to feel it all

pain misery joy

to leave it not as sane as before

traveling across the border into Interzone

as tourist or citizen

as double agent or vaudeville comic

doing the old shtick

spinning out routines

playing William Tell with his wife

till it got too real

comes out of the closet

telling everyone he is Queer

pumping Heroin & anything he can find

into his blood stream to encourage

his manic paranoid hallucinogenic

stream of consciousness

writing streams of words

tied together with the flimsiest fragile threads

pull on one end it unravels

cutting & pasting novels together

pages flying like birds off of his typewriter

swirling around the room

some escape out the window

into the streets

as free as butterflies-

In the Café Apollinaire

visions run rampant

in the flaming eyes

& flaring nostrils of Charles Bukowski's

wild horses running over the hills

pulling another day from under our feet-

From Andy Warhol working over-time

at the Factory producing giant-sized paintings

of green Coke bottles & a thousand cans of soup

to Marilyn Munroe's face breasts & butt

reprinted on ten thousand silk-screens

a genius or charlatan

avant-garde or assembly line art

for the masses-

Some come to Café Apollinaire everyday

obsessed by the intricate

& unintelligible Glass Bead Game

challenging Herman Hess

trying to beat him at his own game

Gunter Grass sits with a midget drummer

watching a hundred television screens

to numb his angst-
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