Get Off My Cloud (An Epic Poem / Part 1)

A word deranged, a word profaned,
a word of Wordsworth, The Temptations,
meteorology and metaphor,
nursery rhymes and
teenagers skipping class
to splay on the grass,
take a toke,
guzzle rum
swiped from a mother’s stash,
hold hands,
tickle stomachs,
and gaze upward,
and find
black and white dragons,
meat cleavers,
rocking chairs,
trombones,
and make up stories
about faces
they find in the sky.

Hey, you, get off of my cloud
Hey, you, get off of my cloud

A word usurped, a word ripped off,
a word once without lucre,
a word kidnapped
by the Omnipotent Colossus,
and its well-paid drones,
drones who have never looked at clouds,
and certainly not from both sides now,
or seen clouds in their coffee,
clouds in their coffee.

I want the word back!
I want William to become a Word Slayer,
and slay this new vulgarity.

To do that, he must travel
forward in time,
through eons of time,
in a space ship
of a timeless cirrus design,
equipped with a cassette player,
and mix tapes with only songs
that mention clouds.

There must be 10,000 such songs.
Another 100,000 unrecorded.
Every tape begins with
Captain Beefheart’s “The Clouds are Full of Wine (Not Whiskey or Rye)”
Every tape ends with that rap song about Edna St Vincent Millay and her cumulus musings.

Prince sang: We’ll get to something higher that doesn’t require clouds
No, we don’t need no clouds.

William the Word Slayer, sir,
never mind Prince’s double negative,
or how terribly wrong he was (the only time),
embrace your new violent destiny.
Go forth and kill. I mean lop some heads.
Put them on pikes.
Dance around the daffodils
lit by a bonfire.

Poets have always wanted to kill.