Muhammad Ali and me.

Muhammad Ali and me.

What is it with you?

Jousting with words

Trying to confer meaning

On the lot of man

Or is it humankind

Never sure of where you stand

To the right of Kerouac

Or the left of Walt Whitman

Planted in the ground

Somewhere between Eliot‘s wasteland

And Shropshire

Like many a young lad

Finding the living as hard as the dying

Amid the cheeky asides of Betjeman.

Mop your brow

Rinse with zero alcohol mouthwash

After the dry cynicism of a few rounds

With Bukowski

Buy another bottle

Put it on the top shelf,

Next to the champagne flutes

You never use,

Where you will need a stool

To take it down

In which case

You must really need it

Go, find yourself

Lost among the classical references

That even find their way into beat poetry

It is all Greek to you

Didn’t Ginsberg write an erotic song

Oh, no, that was Gainsburg

Whatever happened to Jane Birkin

I wonder

JE T'aime…was meant to be serious

I do believe

Go, find an answer to the question

Of reason

When the madness is as real

Today as it always was

Gaze at the crowds of people

Who seem to wander everywhere

When you have nowhere to go

Criticise the innocent

Too naive to care about appearances

When they go barefoot in the rain

It keeps their blue suede shoes dry

Where is the harm in that?

Settle an argument with yourself

For more than a moment

See how hard that can be

When the opinions you hold

Are as slippery as soft soap on a rope

Who is the dope now?

This brings me to Mohammad Ali

What a guy

More than a poet of motion

A man of steel and principle.