In 1959, Thomas hitchhiked from Baltimore to Venice West, where he began
to publish his poetry in Floating Bear, the Evergreen Review,
and other important literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad.
John Thomas was
born in Baltimore. During his second day in kindergarten, he was caught
trying to steal a small piece of scrap lumber. It's been downhill from
there. Thomas attended Loyola College in that grim and dirty city, but
received no degree. After not quite three years among the Jesuits, he
was expelled for "moral turpitude." As Father Drayne, the Dean
of Men, put it "We don't tolerate monkeys like you around here."
John Thomas has
just completed Beat Portraits.
He has published many books, most recently Nevertheless (Illumaniti),
THE BOOK OF SLEEP (Momentum), and Feeding the Animal (Lummox Press).
He lives with his wife, poet Philomene
Long, in Venice West.
John Thomas
The Ghosts of the Poets
“In case you wondered,”
said the dead professor they had
summoned up with their ouija board,
“in case you wondered, we don’t die.
We go to the galaxy in Andromeda.”
And he described it, one tedious letter at a time:
Andromeda, a place of immense
and unrelievable serenity;
a bland and sexless, suffocating place
with not a single wild kidney.
I don’t believe it.
Like Shelley, Stuart Perkoff was cremated.
I picture his stubby hands curling into fists.
The blackened body bends into
a sort of boxer’s crouch.
Stuart’s head: beard gone in a puff
at the first blast of flame;
eyes bubbling that had once, perhaps,
seen into me; skull
fragile as an awk’s egg, crumbling;
flaming bits of cerebellar tissue;
ash of synapses across which had once
flashed poetry, some rather fine poetry.
Smoke. White smoke rising.
But Stuart dead? And the rest?
I don’t believe it, won’t have it,
not for a moment. If he, or if even
the poor and indifferent poets,
are always floating away to Andromeda,
what is left remarkable here
beneath the visiting moon?
So against all logic I say
the alphabetic professor lies.
They are here.
I say the ghosts of the poets
squat in doleful rows on telephone wires.
They crowd the fence rails, weigh down
the branches of the trees. Glumly,
they grub for pennies in the dirty sand
high up at the heads of half-lost rivers.
Some flicker like sad fireflies,
flashing dimly only when we blink.
But they are here.
They are sad, sadder perhaps than when they lived,
but not in Andromeda. Damn ouija and the truth.
They are here.
Do you know what I mean?
Even the barrel of my pen
is full of the ghosts of uncouth poets.
In case you wondered,
they are the wild kidney. They are
the bitter crackling sound I here
when Philomene brushes her hair.
In case you wondered,
they are the small transparent parasols
all of us stroll beneath.
--John Thomas