So here's the explanation of my poem (recently turned into a song).

"Close to the moment". It's about my days in San Francisco, when I felt very alive and vital and my perception of life was literally "Close to the moment", as opposed to the past or future.
"I shook like Michael Coffee" is also literally true in that I was living so close to the bone that I became very aware of my body, and at times I would get so intense that I would tremble (shake) like this old friend of mine Michael Coffey, who, after staying up all night with me, would sit there just shaking all over like a car in idle. The fact that his name sounds the same as coffee, which also makes you shake is an extra bonus.
"I hit like Johnny Banger" is again literally true and has 2 meanings. Johnny Banger (real name: Johnny Moffitt - to bang is to hit, as in drums) was this drummer I knew in San Francisco, who had a huge drum set and played like a maniac - very good too. "Hitting" like Johnny Banger thus means playing drums, but "hit" also means to shoot up drugs, which I had done (Speed-crystal methadrine) around the time I wrote this poem. That's also another reason I was shaking like Michael Coffey.
Oh yeah, I skipped an explanation of the first line, "A life in the day of a rock" - that means what it says. Here I was a person who had felt like an unaware rock most of my life, and now my awareness was so heightened as to make each moment equivalent to a whole life.
Anyway, "I generalized the pain" refers to a style of perceptual defense whereby, I could tolerate and even benefit from the "pain" in my life because I turned the specific sore parts in abstractions and use for my own purposes.
"I Menelaus drained" is a literary reference to King Menelaus who was the Greek King who, after the Troyan War, wandered for eight years before he found his way home. I had essentially been wandering for eight years - and it had "drained" me, but I had started to feel closer to home in S.F.
"Like Little Jimmy Dickens, a bird of paradise fiew up my brain" is sort of a pun, inspired by an old, funny country and western song "May the bird of Paradise fly up your nose", by Little Jimmy Dickens. In my case a combination of drugs and personal inspiration felt like a "bird of paradise up my brain".
"Now I wonder what someone elses brain is like" means just that - I was so immersed in my own consciousness that I wondered if other people perceived the world as I did.

Second verse: "There's a girl on my doorstep, with something in her pocket, Arrows, Circles and drums" is a sort of whimsical description of a girlfriend I had at the time, Lisa Reed, who came to all the Ultrasheen gigs, sort of like my personal groupie who I would sleep with afterwards and then generally not see her until the next gig, although I did like her. The arrows, circles and drums means sex and music.
Even though I was not very responsible with her, "I never did mean her any harm".
"Careless in my movements, she almost bought the farm" refers to my carelessness with her, then my sense of guilt (briefly) when she almost died from menergitis, a serious illness which I did not cause, but somehow feit some responsibility for.
"Buying the farm" is an American expression for dying.
The next line is perhaps the most important in the poem - "I stuffed invalidation with my arm" - That refers to my forcefully dealing with my guilt around her sickness, and even more, dealing with my life long feeling of being in valid ("not genuine", "insignificant", "not good enough") -by "stuffing it with my arm" - in other words, using a sudden burst of my strength (physical and mental) to f ree myself forever of my feeling of invalidation.
This was a very liberating moment in my life, this sense of having burst through to the other side of self-respect.
"Life is eccentric, love eccentricity" - is a kind of abstract way of describing my new sense of freedom - seeing life as a strange, wonderful adjective, and love as a strange, wonderful noun.
"I shun the stolid diplomat in me" means finally rejecting the part of me that was a "stolid" (look it up - like "conservative" and "mediocre") "diplomat", sacrifying my own self-respect for a sence of being diplomatic and proper. Shun means to reject, and I rejected that part of myself and became free.
That is what the poem means!!! And that is why I like it so much, it's like a national anthem or celebration of independance from emotional slavery.

CRIEKO wrote this poem and send it to me for publication in No XQ's propagation in december 1984. The explanation was added to make it complete and was made interactive on this webpoblication.