i
willie went out flying one windy night
he sat on a cloud to contemplate life
then he heard somethin big comin his way
a herd of ghost cows with riders behind
ii
willie watched them rush past in the pingshine
a lesser donkey would have lost his mind
but magic willie is made of sterner stuff
the flyin donkey whooped a mighty cry
iii
yippily kai yay yippily kai yo
Iooky at all that good hamburger roll
kai yay yippily kai yo yippily
i will take two double cheesers to go
iv
one of the riders stopped a spelly spell
change your ways son lest you want helly hell
but willie was lost in his own deep thoughts
and said better throw in some fries as well
Saragun Springs 
I love how this section suddenly turns on a dime and explores an American argot of the Western “cowboy and Indian” regions with its various animal characters…
Exciting poetry should be nothing if not unpredictable and the reader is kept pleasingly off balance at all times, in the rubaiyats of the billygates…
The word and phrase “turn,” “to turn,” “turning,” “turned,” encapsulates what real poetry does….
Probably why Ovid wrote his METAMORPHOSES which fascinated William Shakespeare so greatly….
I read an article which talked about how William Shakespeare most likely had a book chest in which he kept his favorite tomes and probably traveled with it when he went back and forth from his small hometown to his second life in London…(almost certainly he continuously alternated between these two places for most of his life…)
Some of the books that would have been in that chest include Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” Ovid, Montaigne’s essays, Don Quixote, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, plus the works of Christopher Marlowe, especially after Marlowe’s death……..Shakespeare never got over the shock of it….
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Hi Dale
Windy rainy spring day at work. But your comments are highly encouraging and I like what you said about smut.
I will comment further tonight, but I wanted to let you know that they haven’t been taken for granted!
Leila
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Thank you, Leila.
These two new sections of the poem are really overwhelmingly good.
The one that begins with “toil and trouble” has really taken over my mind and heart right now. This is “nonsense poetry” as High Literature. In some ways it reminds (in a great way) of Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
It’s pure language, very hard to achieve and very very very rarely achieved…
There isn’t a single word wasted nor a single word that shouldn’t be there…
Looking forward to hearing more whenever you can…
D
As Tom Waits said, “Son, there’s gonna be a lotta things in this world you’re gonna have no use for – and he was right.”
Smut is one of those things…
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Thank you Dale
The Moving Hoof is greatly appreciative of your comments as she speeds toward 100 little quatrains!
Leila
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Hi Dale
I imagine books were extra precious in the Bard’s time. I keep hoping for two unlikely things (so far) one being a message from another planet and the discovery of “Shakespeare’s Diary.”
Leila
.”
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“He would declare and could himself believe / that the birds there in all the garden round / from having heard the daylong voice of Eve / had added to their own an oversound / her tone of meaning but without the words….” – Robert Frost
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Thank you for Frost! Do miss the days of living celebrated poets!
Leila
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These days it seems the only poets who break through in a big way are the ones who celebrate their own identity politics in the simplest, least-subtle, and most politically-correct, pre-made, pre-approved phrases. Bob Dylan himself says so in his book “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Thank God for Harold Bloom’s “saving remnant,” all the many people who still want to read poetry for the art of it, not the political competition.
I read an article on the Poetry Foundation website that spent its entire time doing nothing but SLAMMING Charles Bukowski as a writer and a man.
The article gave three main reasons why Bukowski is bad and not to be admired at any cost.
One: Because he was a drunk who celebrated that fact. This was the main charge which the writer of the article weakly and repeatedly leveled at Bukowski, almost as if drinking heavily were a sin greater than murder itself. (“The Son of Man comes eating AND drinking,” said Jesus, holding up his wine goblet.)
Two: Because he made a few racist comments in his work over time. (The writer of the article left out the fact that Bukowski made FAR more NON-racist statements in his work than he did racist ones.)
Three: Because Bukowski was a “misogynist” who was also part of the patriarchy (this about a man who was a total outsider and who also clearly loved women including his daughter who he helped take very good care of. He did make some misogynistic comments at times but wasn’t a woman-hater at, or in, his core, and his girlfriends, and wife, were always some of the most liberated women going, including powerful artists like Linda King).
The article was so unfair to Bukowski that it was and is utterly laughable!
And yet it’s published on the “venerable” Poetry Foundation website as if it weren’t a joke…
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Hi Dale
About Bukowski. Unknowns who attack the Known are worthless. There are a great many once reputable publications that exist only in their old name but not in quantity. “Sports Illustrated ” comes to mind, they were caught using AI and calling it human.
I gotta feeling Buk would laugh and tell the snowflake to fuck off. I would tell the foundation to do the same. People not political agendas.
Leila
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Leila
Very much yes!! What you said about this Buk-bashing business makes me feel a whole lot better. Another reason why you’re my BFF.
I discovered two fun factoids about The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald which I certainly never knew and are totally worth pointing out.
One: Woody Guthrie recorded a few sections of the Rubaiyat on his record Hard Travelin’.
Two: The Grateful Dead’s famous “skull and roses” poster is based on the original illustrations for EF’s R of OK.
I also think that the double album LAYLA AND OTHER ASSORTED LOVE SONGS by none other than Derek and the Dominoes should win a place as an honorary, occasional, or at least partial soundtrack for the rubaiyat of the billigits.
LAYLA AND OTHER ASSORTED LOVE SONGS has always been one of my favorite albums since I was perhaps 14 years old. Hadn’t listened to it in a very long time, but played the whole thing in the car the other day while the dog pack and I were slowly driving around on forest preserve roads. Damn, is it a total masterpiece. I have always placed it (mentally) on the shelf right next to three other masterpiece double albums it shares much in common with: The White Album, Blonde on Blonde, and Exile on Main Street.
Since LAYLA AND OTHER ASSORTED LOVE SONGS has roots in old-time Persian Literature, just like the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the rubaiyat of the billigits, I think it’s very much worth mentioning/thinking upon.
Also, since you saw Clapton and Muddy Waters in Seattle. I never saw Muddy, but I did see Clapton in St. Louis when I was 15. The most fascinating part of the show was when he came out on stage all alone before the show and set up all the instruments on his own, etc. Once he was done doing all that work himself, he simply picked up his guitar and started to PLAY. The band came out after that as if they weren’t even aware he was about to start playing.
This developing poem of yours, Leila, which is heading into the home stretches, is absolutely exciting, MORE exciting than a Clapton concert.
Thank you!!
Dale
PS
the rubaiyat of the billigits also seems to share many things in spirit with certain songs off both The White Album and Blonde on Blonde…the reinvention of the eternal nursery rhyme aspect of it, among other things….
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Hi Dale
Thank you. One thing about poetry you can invent new rules.
I want to address the society of holy gravespitters who aim to black pencil people from history. They should read 1984 to gain an insight.
I do not like Trump but I also (even more) dislike the so called enlightened people who act just as childish in response to him. I miss things being unworthy of us.
That is the mindset of bully pulpit conservatism AND liberalism as well.
Damning Buk, who wrote as an alter ego, shows no capacity to look deeper into things.
Thank you
Leila
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…Electric Ladyland by Jimi was the other classic double album I couldn’t think of earlier that can sit on the mental shelf beside Blonde, White Album, Exile, and LAYLA…And can be an occasional symbolic soundtrack of sorts to parts of these rubaiyat…in an Alice “one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small” literary dreamworld kinda way…See “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” lyric sheet…the billigits and crew are fantastic at conjuring up memories of great things…………….one thing great poems always do. -D
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Leila
I know what you mean. I was brought before tribunals of the holy gravespitters in the years 2012 – 2014 and 2018 at both the University of Illinois, and then Roosevelt University, both in downtown Chicago. Charges included myself choosing different curriculum from the pre-approved ones, and yours truly refusing to let technology dominate my classroom. Both these offenses were cardinal sins, and in the end I was summarily dismissed from both institutions (and/or I quit before they fired me). There was also that thing about how they thought I was crazy.
A refusal to toe the line is very much frowned upon in academia these days by the holy gravespitters, it will get you metaphorically killed, and these things, for many of us, also lead to near-self-killing depressions in the wake of such systematic betrayals of the free critical spirit by the groupthink crowd-pleasers.
These are some of the massive reasons why I was so deeply, spiritually relieved and renewed to discover yourself and the other good editors and writers at LS, etc etc…
And Borges said, When you lose something, you gain something else you just can’t see yet. That was also very much true for me because I gained something more precious than having a job in USA academia. It’s called: My Freedom…
Thank you Leila!
Dale
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I ALSO ABSOLUTELY ADORE, AND LOVE, HOW SO MUCH OF THIS POEM (all of the rubaiyats I mean) SEEMS TO TAKE PLACE IN The Sky…
That is a wild poetic device that is exceedingly effective in this context…
It raises the whole thing up and adds myriad levels of interest and witchy intrigue, AND it somehow seems to address the modern mindset that is so often trained on what lies above us these days……
Humans have always looked at the stars, and now we also try to gaze beyond them…Literally (and for some few of us – the poets – inwardly)…
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Hi Dale
I like the sky a lot, I also like the pattern that trees form against the sky. Oddly, I am afraid of flying. Only been on one plane and that was enough for me!
Thanks again!
Leila
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Leila, hi!
It’s weirdly cool (and creatively synchronous) that you mention the patterns of trees against the sky, as just last night I took a long series of photographs of that very exact same thing – the black branches were barely budding, the white clouds were weirdly lit up by the city lights, the moon was behind all, there was a strange uncanny glow between and behind everything in the black night sky, and also an electrical pole thing made of wood in the middle of all that looked like Jesus’ cross (in the photos) and I named this series “Good Friday.”
Boo and I don’t fly either – I haven’t been on a plane since the year 2000. My reasons are I can’t stand waiting in all the lines and I’m too paranoid to be shaken down by all the security officials, especially with the things I’m usually carrying upon my person. Also, I read that Sam Shepard didn’t fly so I decided to join him. And, commercial airlines produce many thousands of times the pollution that cars do – hardly anyone is aware of this absolute fact.
But we do drive!
Dale
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Hi Dale
This one was the only that had a link for me to reply.
I admire your stand and am saddened by your fate. But I believe in the karmic wheel. Colleges should be set apart from social trends and deal with the facts and let the students make up their own minds. To spoonfeed them someone like Maya Angelou only (not that there’s anything wrong with her– but Langston Hughes was better) is doing them a disservice. It fails to prepare them for the scrum of life. Out here you do not get to dictate terms, and HR won’t strop you from getting your ass kicked whether you deserve it or not. Goddam chattle. Then again there are those who live to knock the noses off statues. They are irrelevant people. Yet they are in charge. Come on Karma, work to do.
Thanks again!
Leila
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L
Just letting you know I saw this. My gratitude is eternal.
D
PS,
Irrelevant people in charge – a brilliant, rare understanding and a brilliant way of saying it, too!…….
PPS – Yes, Langston Hughes is better…Ralph Ellison too and he gets slammed and ignored for loving white writers who deserve it…..
PPPS, – Yes, colleges and all schools should teach HOW to think, not WHAT to think…that goes for right-wingers AND left-wingers….When Plato and Aristotle started the modern educational institution the last thing on their minds was creating groupthinkers…..
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It’s all becoming a bit wild out there. I must fashion a protective helmet of some sort.
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Indeed, Willie is a bit out of control. Still, he is invited to all the parties. Never a dull time.
Thank you Diane!
Leila
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