the long abandoned self

plumping on the noise,
recognizing her deception; thus it was
a royal screwing and not just the
story so far the fingers of dead
friends twitching in the bad dreams
our confrontations fallen to the wayside
you were the spring, and summer too,
I'm going out to search for you...
my inter-planetary journeys caught up
in the storm of modern disaster
I've been to mars on a
scholarship from a hidden source
left the maps and noise behind
the booty dredged
through sand and wind and I am here
regarded as a clown, no smokey
robinson not beautiful, but envisioned
as he who would finally break
the trunk-lid, discovering his long
abandoned self. Are we all like this?
grown silvered in our coverings the
words just lies a fabric of regard
layering years and meanings into
a shroud meant to deny the only truth
that matters: who am I?

A truly remarkable statement, he says, proud of his ancient self. The quote in mid-poem is from a song done by Joan Baez, "North" on the album entitled "Joan" which originally appeared I believe in 1967. The piece references the Keye Luke poems. The reference to a scholarship from a hidden source merely means that I was living off of Pat Smith at the time. Stealing my writing time from someone else's labor. If I hadn't done that I probably wouldn't have written nearly as many things as I did write. I felt guilty about that and attempted to rectify it by creating as a good a situation as I could for Becky Bradway to write. I know now that this was a mistake. I was stupid to give up the work, but I was overwhelmed by the guilt I had over the fiasco of 1979. And over my guilt for being with Pat but seeing other women. It was the sixties though and we all professed not to be "possessive". As it was most of my regrets about the 70s are about the women I didn't actually have sex with. A typical male evaluation, based on the biological impulse no doubt. In any case, the self that is abandoned in this poem is clearly the writer that I actually am. I may have fucked it up. I may have let it go for too long. But that fact is that writing these poems is a central part of my being and always has been. If in fact it is is essentially a detective story, and I see it that way, then this is the work that I hid in the trunk for all those years. The abandoned self.

But, yes, I don't really understand the first line.