an excerpt from PARK SONGS: A POEM/PLAY by David Budbill
Publication Date: September 2012
$14.95
14 Black and White Photographs by R. C. Irwin
(ISBN 978-1-935259-16-9)
(eBook 978-1-935259-17-6)
talking to someone who isn't there.
Wait a minute! Wait a minute, you Bastard!
You can't talk to me that way! Who do you think you are!
I was reading all those names you're always dropping
before you could read! Don't condescend to me you provincial,
tin-eared ambitionist. Just because Don Pullen plays the piano
with his forearms and his fists does not mean he can't play Rachmaninoff; it means only he chooses not to! If I choose to speak
in an archaic tone; salubrious and beautiful, cadenced and melodious, I can! Which is to say: I actually, premeditatedly, deliberately and consciously speak in this harsher tongue, in vulgar tones, mordant, acrimonious, base, insulting, pedestrian and contemptible, because
in this gross speech, I hear a lyric beauty–the untutored crassness, the common moans–that overflows my soul and I know a sense of love and oneness with ordinary people which lifts me up above the arrogant literati, like you, you little twerp, and I float on these common songs to a place I know as home which sure as hell
ain't where you come from you narrow-minded little asshole.
All of which is, in short, to say: you should not mistake my modesty for stupidity, I certainly do not mistake your arrogance for intelligence!