Poet's Passage (Jim Carroll)

The head of Coltrane's Naima is blown coldly in this morning's coffee shop

Somebody's horns for hire

At Our Lady of Pompeii the organist begins and stops and begins again over and over practicing for a funeral, or maybe not

Maybe the poet can't afford the organist. Maybe the priest said to the organist, now Seamus, we have a nine thirty send off and you can practice until then

In memoriam Giuseppe Mucci,

Donated by Conrad Boretti

We have the inevitable Gounod, something too florid, then it's Handel the great self plagiarist on a riff from Samson

Total eclipse, no sun, no moon, all dark, all dark. No more Delilah for you, darling Jim, those days are done

In memoriam Enrico Rossanno

Donated by Giovanni Barratini

The priest appears in his gym clothes and lights the candles

then disappears into the mysterious priestly closet stage right

and flicks on the light

Now in the dome cherubim pass rosaries down to the shipwrecked

And one kid hovers, prayerful, over the damned

In memoriam Rev. Anthony Demo

And now the priest is glimpsed all in white peeping around the post stage left

Waiting for the pale oak box, pale as the poet ever was

In memoriam Giuseppe Mucci

Donated by Conrad Boretti 

And now we stand for the squeaking gurney and the white gloved undertaker's men

stern, disinterested

And the hired singer does the Ave Maria like to pierce your heart

And the uptick in the weeping

In memoriam Rev. Anthony Demo

The priest tells of the faith of Martha

That we must be like Martha

And gives the speech about our brother in Christ

And the joyous resurrection to come

In memoriam Enrico Rossanno

Donated by Giovanni Barratini 

And the hired singer gives the Agnus Dei like to pierce your heart

And then the communion, and the priest doing it for kindness and off the books

And the priest says now would anyone like to speak about our brother James

Then Patti gets up to sing

And it is beautiful

And the poet is conveyed to the sky in that

Then the hired singer sings the In Paradisum like to pierce your heart

And Seamus goes to his sandwiches

And Jim to his grey conveyance

And we to the rain

16 September, 2009, Our Lady of Pompeii RC Church, Bleecker Street in the Village

Poet-musician and novelist Jim Carroll died at his desk on September 11, 2009. He was 60 years old. The text above was written his funeral at Our Lady of Pompeii in Greenwich Village. Jim started showing up at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery the year that organization was founded, 1966. He was in his mid-teens at the time. Early on, he was recognized as a prodigy by writers Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs.  His best-known book, The Basketball Diaries (1978), chronicled his double life as a star athlete at a prestigious private high school and a junky hustler on Times Square. It was made into a movie in 1995, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim. The Jim Carroll band's 1980 album Cathoic Boy has been called the last great punk record. For more information on Jim's life and work, including audio clips, click here.

There will always be a poem
I will climb on top of it and come
In and out of time,
Cocking my head to the side slightly,
As I finish shaking, melting then
Into its body, its soft skin

--Jim Carroll, "Poem"
from Void of Course (1998)

Jim Carroll photo (2000) ©Eric Thompson, used by permission.