Would You Wear My Eyes?

By: Erik Rittenberry

Every time I open my big mouth
I put my soul in it.
It takes so much to be nothing,
to shroud the mind’s eye
from the gaudy theater
of the head.

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Hey subscribers, it’s Friday and I feel like sharing a poem with you all from one of my all-time favorite Beat Poets — the great Bob Kaufman.

Kaufman was an American poet, a street poet, a jazz poet, “a poet of the people.” He wasn’t mainstream and unfortunately (or fortunately) he never captured worldwide notoriety like his contemporaries Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Gary Snyder.

He was a poet who preferred the hidden shadows of the city over the seduction of fame and fortune.

Kaufman grew up in New Orleans reading Henry James, Proust, Melville, Flaubert, and many others. At 18, he became a laborer and then joined the Merchant Marine. It was at this time during the Eisenhower years that the Beat literary movement slithered out of the arid American soil of conventionality and monotony.

The Beat poets were young spiritual renegades on a quest for the deeper meaning of it all. Their hyperbolic writings and wild antics sparked that infamous movement of what sociologists labeled “the counter-culture”— that youthful explosion of art, music, sex, psychedelics, and rebellion.

These poets and writers were in defiance against, in the words of Kerouac, “the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…”

There they were — Walt Whitman’s illegitimate children, poetic bohemians, metaphysical dissidents, ramblin’ around the country in complete defiance of the banal, television-watchin’, materialistic charade of a lifestyle that was sweeping across the nation.

It was around this time that Kaufman headed to San Fran where he met the king of the Beats himself, Jack Kerouac. Shortly after the encounter, Kaufman reinvented himself as a poet, spiritually and in the flesh. He refused to work pointless jobs and accepted the inevitable poverty and hardships that came with pursuing the arts.

He once wrote: “I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

Poetry was it for him, his “golden eternity,” and he would do it with nothing to fall back on. He was arrested numerous times, locked up and beaten, and then spit back onto the cold streets of the city. And he still wrote. Relentlessly.

During the times that he wasn’t in jail, you might find Kaufman on any given day standing on the tables in some hipster café or on some midnight corner under a lamplight reciting his own poetry for any and everyone to hear.

Bob Kaufman was a voyager, a madman with a moonburnt soul, a “wanderer of the heart, wanderer of star worlds, off to a million tomorrows.” As he once wrote:

When I die,
I won’t stay
Dead.

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do. You can find it in the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

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Would You Wear My Eyes?

My body is a torn mattress,
Disheveled throbbing place
For the comings and goings
Of loveless transients.
The whole of me
Is an unfurnished room
Filled with dank breath
Escaping in gasps to nowhere.
Before completely objective mirrors
I have shot myself with my eyes,
But death refused my advances.
I have walked on my walls each night
Through strange landscapes in my head.
I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,
Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.
My face is covered with maps of dead nations;
My hair is littered with drying ragweed.
Bitter raisins drip haphazardly from my nostrils
While schools of glowing minnows swim from my mouth.
The nipples of my breasts are sun-browned cockleburrs;
Long-forgotten Indian tribes fight battles on my chest
Unaware of the sunken ships rotting in my stomach.
My legs are charred remains of burned cypress trees;
My feet are covered with moss from bayous, flowing
across my floor.
I can’t go out anymore.
I shall sit on my ceiling.
Would you wear my eyes?