THE REST WAS SILENCE

We were in San Francisco standing on a steep, sloping corner outside an Italian Ice store, smoking a joint in the cold , cutting wind. It was a beautiful night otherwise, because down the hill you could see the lights of the downtown buildings form a bright crescent around the bay. It was night and it was lovely but I was slightly drunk and shivering in my sport coat, and the joint made nervous as an assassin’s cat. The famous poet who’d come to see our reading at New College asked me what I thought of Gang of Four and Lydia Lunch. My stammering blended brilliantly with the gust of wind that swept over us just then. I muttered something finally about Johnny Winter and turned to look at the skyline and the expanse of the black bay and the boat lights that dotted the surface with bobbing bursts of yellow and red. Save for the gusting bluster, the rest was silence.

PAPER FLAG

A paper flag is in the window, stars and stripes bleached by hot and cold winds and all the sunshine California brags about even on afternoons where smoke crowds the horizon and air burns your lungs as you breathe, The stars and bars are now a faint, rusted green, a nauseated tint of yellow erodes the edges of each straight line, What was once white is a crinkled brow, a worried grey, the blue we knew is cracked and lined with spiderwebbing and the dry shells of dead insects,

The tape holding the paper to the window sill is likewise cracked, baked onto the glass paned, affixed as long as the window remains unshattered but long after the rage that made many scream one syllable slogans and cry at cat videos and cartoons of angry eagles clutching lightning bolts and missals in its talons has receded like beach sand coming and going with tides that occur whether we pay attention or not,

This day is pleasant, the workman are somewhere else with their tar and jackhammers, but this window still bears the paper flag staring at the traffic and diminishing pedestrian density as the sun recedes and the shadows get longer while whatever was on our mind as a species scrolls off the list of many things we’ll get to think all the way through.

I HATE POETRY

I hate poems about poetry but I do like poems with dirt under the fingernails,

that is,

verses that make less sense than a man and woman in the center lane of the expressway with all their furniture and A Sylvania tv that glowers with one big eye at passing traffic, yup, the news THEY DON’T REPORT when you need to hear it most. I like poems that are so full of crap that each stanza could fertilize acres of future corn, i have NO poems about poets or cats ,

no dog poems either but lets have more poems about baseball because BASEBALL is ALREADY a poem for the ages. Meanwhile, I remember your face coming out of the mist of the night parking lot and find myself grousing and grazing under lovely trees, after a walk, rubbing my knees.

WE CROSS AND UNCROSS OUR LEGS

We cross and uncross our legs
at the same time, light one cigarette
and then another, one for each hand,
check ourselves into rehabs and rental cars
that are out of control and useless to
a decent conversation,

it's just that we don't talk,

we just borrow each other's make up
and best stolen ad libs,

that is to say that stuff
is getting in the way of my stuff
and the more I try to describe
your best features , my image
vanishes in the bathroom mirror,

should i leave the seat up or down
and should you pull out a chair or a
gun and a bag of candy?

one of us will leave this relationship

and it won't be either of us, I will say that much.
otherwise , we should confine our remarks
to how we can stretch the meaning of words
and even rock solid ideas of reality as easily
as we can the waist band of a pair of stretch pants
one of us bought on the internet, stretch it until it breaks
and everything we created

 in 1st and 2nd person
drops to our ankles
 and neither of us
 gets anything from the other,

not even a middle finger.

Bruno Mars

To the matter as to whether Bruno Mars , who is not black, is appropriating black music and an aesthetic born of African American experience, created by talented black artists, well…I don’t know the man’s music, let alone his version of Black Style. I will him be and not mention him again in this harangue. Appropriation has been with us forever, although I would suggest that the non-black musicians playing music that is African American in origin have, for the most part, a genuine love of the sounds they've been exposed to. Theft is theft and black creators must be located, credited and their families paid for the use of the bodies of work that formed the foundation for a huge amount of American culture and a character, but at the same time it seems reductive and ironically bigoted to suggest that only black musicians have the right, let alone the sole ability to make authentic jazz, blues, or rhythm and blues. Forcing matters of creativity into a any kind of requirements for acceptance is absurd and contrary to what art is supposed to do, the process through which an individual--an artist--experiences the world and , through the use of whatever medium moves him enough to create objects of beauty of contemplation that hadn't existed before. Pretty much going with Marcuse on this one, as in his bookd the Aesthetic Dimension, where he argues that Society, The Establishment, the Powers that Be, need to leave the artists and allow them to perform their task with their art making, to produce joy. Otherwise, if held to aesthetic principles that are contrary to inspiration, it ceases to be art. It is Propaganda. We do not need an American version of Soviet Realism, no matter where it comes from. It goes to authenticity that one writes in a style that is natural to them; whites writing in idioms that makes sense for Mance Liscomb is clearly insulting to black musicians and black culture in general. It is a not so subtle form of racism: it says "I think you're exotic, not quite human, something wholly "other" than normal. I will take your funny sounds and use them to decorate my cosmology." Absent the absolutist argument that only black musicians have the right to play blues and are the only ones who can have anything authentic expression (it's a powerful argument), the bottom line of the blues is the clear, simple, emotionally honest expression of one's experiences. That would mean that one find their own voice, something they can bring of themselves to the music they desire to perform and make it genuinely personal. There is a difference, a fine one, between having a personal style greatly influenced by black music and singers and one that slavishly tries to impersonate the sound, causing all sorts of suspicious Rich Little-isms. Those influenced by black artists but who have their own style, free of affectation: Butterfield, Mose Allison, Van Morrison, Tom Waits. Those who fail: Jagger, when he sings blues, Peter Wolfe, others galore. Wolf is listenable and usually effective as vocalist and frontman, but he never convinced me that his style was cleverly constructed, contrived. I won't go as far as to say he's guilty of minstrelsy, but his banter where spews hip argot, rope-a-dope rhymes and other offerings of hep-cat impersonation, comes off as cartoonish, stagy, really stereotypical of black performance; whether Cab Calloway or James Brown or an inspired preacher sermonizing from the pulpit of a black church, Wolf's machine gun is appropriation straight out. I had often wished he'd just keep his mouth shut and just sing.Yes, I realize the irony of the last sentence, but I think you see my point even if you might not agree with it. J.Geils is a band I've enjoyed a great deal over the last few decades, but there are times when Wolf's unreconstructed enthusiasm turns into caricature and stereotype. He reminds me of someone trying to beat his influences at their own game rather than forging something that is really his own.

THE SHAME IS NOT IN THE FALLING DOWN

Not a minute goes by
where I don’t reach from my chair
to the coffee table
for a drink that is only water,
lukewarm at that, ice melted,
sides of the glass perspiring.

Too many people smoking
their cigarettes to the filter,
not enough ash trays,
the glass of water is grey and black,
soggy and swelled filters
crowding the glass top to bottom
like bodies recovered
from a boat that sank
a week ago
off the coast of nowhere
no one here can name
nor cares to talk about
instead of what they watched
on tv last night
or exactly how bad
their service was at the steak house.

I am, though, still thirsty,
bored with coffee,
needing something cold, clear,
no sugar, to sooth
the splintering edges of my throat.

When I cough,
it sounds like mountains
sliding into dramatic ravines,
it feels like being shot
with an arrow an archer
lost sight of once it was
fired into the sky.

My friend is a woman
I’ve known as a mystery
novel for decades
and she asks me
what I desire tonight
in a living room full of smoke
and distracted chatter.
I tell her water
and she kicks me in the foot,

She is a mystery novel
I will likely not finish reading
because I
really hate
coming to the end
of a genuinely good time.

Don't think about dying

I don’t think about dying crossing the bridge, my shoes are the wrong hue for just a rude thing to do in the middle of the day And drivers on cell phones making hay before sunset speed by in blurry clouds of exhaust with a coffee cup wedged between their thighs peripherally and only for a second think they saw someone at the slimmest edge of their distractions climb over the safety rail, arms stretched and then reaching up as if to pounce from a diving board, they shake their heads and get back to their driving and manic chatter , the really hot coffee is still cradled between their thighs, about to spill and that’s no thrill at all, after all.