Giant Steps, Lazy Bird

The poem “The Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman is a poem about believing in science or believing in what you think. I wanted to write a poem like this so I wrote this poem. It is about humanity being unable to think deeper into itself and discover the beauty of its dangerous places. We’re taught not to go to these places. Why not? There may be beauty there. The title comes from the title of two songs by John Coltrane

Giant Steps, Lazy Bird

We need to learn,

All the people,

And all of you sad bricks,

To smile

And we’re sick with leaves in our hair,

Drunk and upside down on heaven. The

Sick street folk knead and knead at their toes.

The one man who was blue in the face THEN

Has died and eagles mark his grave with sparse

Defecation. All hail all! All the street men scream

And the buckets they cackle are raw with sewage and

Their sun caked

Lips clamp and smash.

“We’re all mighty!” one of the

3

Fat Ones says.

And the Fat Ones #2 says it!

“We must be ‘ll mighty!”

“Boys be stupid and quick the world is

A dead plant” “Holla!”

And the Lazy Bird hollers.

His records are smashed and

Folklore. Beckoning him,

Street

People,

Sick Minstrel with his tongue tied and

His fingers dead from one or 7,0000

0000 clicks at the keys.

Your troll beauty is pitching her

Tent in the soup kitchen slums

And her troll feet, dear god! we

Perish in sixteenths like the gallows.

And her troll feet, sick stringly strange

Killing in thirty-seconds the Napoleonic

Gallows, the giant steps!