Vision of Sound:
A Concert of Live Music and Dance 2009
"Eine Kinda Bachmusik, pt.2" from "3 preludes to missing the point"
Choreagraphy: Cheryl Wilkins-Mitchell
Piano: Blaise Bryski
Dancers (The Syracuse University South Side Initiative KUUMBA Project):
Waniesha Allen, Caroline Charles, Ashley Green, Margaret Moreno, Niquan Williams, Amani Wortham

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Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds it's all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead
Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and forty-seven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You're hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool

And everybody after that
is always making
models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come
down
and sit in
in their combo
as if he is the king cat
who's got to blow
or they can't quite make it

Only he don't come down from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world new
from the usual unreliable source
real dead


"A Coney Island of the Mind" Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.