ORTHODOX BLUES can't anyone read between the stars that basket floating down the river is empty my inner-crow has flown the coop higher ground was a sweet pipedream an uninhabitable symbol mathematic mistake philosophical faux pas what are the odds of digging up a damond anyway? rosetta stone & loaded dice only slow me down ground me to memory true nature is honey throat bleeding black words regenerative death songs scratched on some other heaven hartenbach FEAR & LAUGHING if those are unwanted words flappping in the wind then this must be where ghosts go to die constant change, form in flux the gift that keeps giving peeling back faces of dead presidents, fugitive gods mad scientists, sad debutantes overdosed soup bones martyred saints & sacrificed sons to find absoulutes but all you get are layers & layers of denial romantic fade-outs, paper thin equilibrium emphatic question marks unbearable domestication enigmatic cliff-hangers, chance encounters more & more distance hell, pharoah's army could march through these gaps in reasoning hartenbach Black Dog black dog tied to late 70's grand am doesn't know opiate tenderness or thrill of misinterpretation no aimless driving in middle of the night breaking down in front of unsympathetic headlights the tragic rhythm of stranger's conversation of rhyming rhetoric of backseat drivers tangled up in radio foreplay & semantics looking for some sort of sign in even most familiar & mundane fretting over possibility constant folding & unfolding whitman might console him with pat on head kerouac might emphathize & offer a friendly shot jeffers might cut him loose or black dog might become a metaphor still tied to that dilapidated machine hartenbach