Americans, for your perusal. Peace. 

My Little Book of Guns

Book 1

Guns An Introduction

Adults please leave the room for just a sec.

Ok kids, adults are insane but you don’t have to be: assault weapons are bad, and should be completely banned.

Guns chapter 1

I had a Davy Crockett rifle that fired caps and little corks. We’d run out of ammo and have to pretend to bonk the enemy over the head just like at the Alamo. You know, “gun-wielding”. It didn’t occur to us to mow anybody down. There was lots of fake hand-to-hand fighting. My big sister occasionally tried to declare peace but we were unclear on the concept. We actually took turns being the victors or defeated losers. You got to win, or you were told you were dead. Then you had to lie down and count to ten.

Guns Chapter 2

Years ago I had a roommate – a jazz musician – who got a job as a security guard night watch. He told me they gave employees the option of carrying a gun or not. He chose not to, he said, because he might shoot me with it. Of course I thanked him. Then we had beers.

Guns Chapter 3

When I was young and working in North Beach I was held up at gun point at work. He stood between me and the only exit and backed out the door with the gun trained on me. I prayed no one would come in the door behind him. His hand was shaking. 

2nd Amendment, anyone?

Guns Chapter 4

I was also held up at knife point at work. I worked at a liquor store.The man with the knife came behind the counter, between me and the only exit. 

My co-worker was trying to decide whether to try and defend me by hitting the robber over the head with a wine bottle. He chose not to. 

Epilogue.

The knife-wielding robber returned months later filled with remorse. He’d been fired and was trying to support his young daughter. He was desperate.

He promised to pay the money he stole back. 

I know. The moral is unclear. It’s not an advertisement for an assault rifle, however.

Guns Chapter 5

I was actually shot at only once.

I was walking down Haight St in the old days. Back in the seventies. Heard a sound in a window across the street and instantly a handful of leaves were torn off the tree right above my ear. 

They rained down quietly. 

I didn’t think to zig zag or take cover. 

Or wonder, why me?

Why not me?

Book 2

Guns in Everyday Life

I have a friend who owns a gun. I’m sure he distrusts the police, feels at odds with society at large and understands a gang mentality somehow. 

He demonstrated how gunfire sounds in his neighborhood.

It’s a rapid succession of pops.

“Popopop pop pop!”

Then screaching car tires.

-Oh, and a lady I know lives on a block where a five year old girl was killed. Accident. Drive by shooting. Wrong place. Wrong time.

-Oh, and a co-worker who had relatives at a house in Oakland where multiple people were killed by gunfire at a party on a Saturday night. 

In Conclusion

It seems like it makes sense for women to have the right to bear arms. Protect and defend. Men, not so much.

Oh and the Second Amendment. Well Regulated. That would be your National Guard. 

Postscript. 

Instead of a nationally prominent politician, Harvey Milk is a monument. He is greatly missed.

jk

11/7/2017

…
Bonus question: 

Do you have a relative who accidentally shot himself (non-fatally, fortunately)? I do. A couple  of generations back. A little to the right or left and I probably wouldn’t be here.

***

Generations of Lost Time

(11/ 2018)

“On the night of October 1, 2017, a lone gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. He killed 58 people and wounded 422, with the ensuing panic bringing the injury total to 851. The shooter, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old man from Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel.”

900 Lost Years. The Generation of Lost Time

What is lost when a person dies through gun violence?

The average age of the those twelve people who had their lives taken through an act of gun violence at today’s mass shooting (Thousand Oaks, 2018) being 20 years, and normal life expectancy being perhaps 75 years; that’s 55 lost years, say, multiplied by a factor of twelve equals 660 lost, unlived years. Potentially.

Yes, perhaps 12 lives lost, and 660 lost years, individually. But 75-year life expectancies x12 people equals 900 potential years of individual living, extinguished. In a few minutes.

Almost one thousand years of actual life not lived due to today’s gun violence here in California.

Think back one thousand years, because that’s what that is.

But listen:

If the median age of the 59 fatalities in the Las Vegas mass shooting a year ago, which some at today’s shooting witnessed, was 40 years, it’s safe to say each victim would have lived out another 30 yrs, so that’s almost a cumulative potential of 1,800 years of living taken away in last year’s Vegas massacre.

A period of 30 years is thought of as one generation, and by definition each generation would progress and procreate, so there is an equivalence, that if approximately 60 generations of life were lost- if thought of as a quantity of linear time, each life standing hand in hand, as it were- it would symbolically stretch back to the second century- to the year 218 a.d. of the common era, so could represent a lost history from that time- including the (lost) emergence of modern Western Civilization.

My co-worker, the former Tibetan monk, says that the generations of Lost Time should be imagined forward- not backward- toward the year 3818, symbolically.

What would this world be like in that advanced (lost) forward time? And, symbolically, any advances would be lost to humanity over that (symbolically) lost time of history, that can’t happen in this scenario.

That’s 59 people standing in a row forward or backward in linear time.

And add today’s 12 people into the calculation of lost time.

And last week, in Pittsburgh. (The Synagogue tragedy).

And now that loss is incalculable.

***

A Child’s Garden of Death;

An Alphabetic Primer

A is for Aftermath:

When something occurs that’s severe

B is for Bathos: politics that’s insincere

C is for Casualties- that’s what you kids were

D is for Dark Ages when false beliefs seem sure

E is for Emergency: mostly predictable griefs

F is for Failure and Flowers in wreaths

G is for Government unwilling to act

H for Hypocrisy feigning to care about the social contract

I is for Inconsequential, lives for which we don’t shed a tear

J is for Japan with less than ten gun deaths per year

K is for Kiss when someone says goodbye

L is for Last on a day with a sigh

M is Mentality like the automatic weapons-toting kind

N is for NRA (out of my mind)

O is for “ oh my god” as after the gunfire’s sound

P is for Plot as in planning, or a spot in the ground

Q is for Quandary what kind of automatic weapon to get

R is for Requiescat en Pace and forever regret

S is for Semi-automatic with a bump stock and extra magazines

T is for Tragedy and the search for what it means

U is for Unidentified until the parents are told

V as in in Violent Entertainment that never gets old

W as in Weapons of Mass Destruction which are used on a school ground

X as in crossroads where our destiny is lost or found

Y as in Young and hopeful- to the future we’re sending

Think well before we reach Z, a message a bit less

Heart rending.

jk

2/15/18

***

:1963 “The Release of the JFK Assassination Files, The Final Frontier”

Or, “Lying to Seven Year Olds”

Children.

The President was shot today. He died.

For a while, we don’t know how long,

your house will be full of ghosts.

Whenever you’re alone, a ghost. Under your bed, ghosts. On the landing: Definitely.

One ghost, the young President. Shot dead. And now he’s a ghost- floating around everywhere. So lonely.

That’s what death is. You become like an image you can’t forget. But everywhere.

The very young president, shot dead and now wandering. Wondering what happened. Longing to tell you something, to know something.

A sad quiet sick feeling in the whole world for days. Thumping drums, horses’ hooves. TV becomes a funeral parlor. A picture of the ghost in every window.

Scary as it is as a kid, you and the ghost have an understanding. That, if you could figure it out, the dead President could be at peace. The president wouldn’t have to wander forever. Not to hope to lead, and to be unable. Not to wish so hard to reassure the people, and to be unheard.

What would help would be the truth.

Just to tell the truth. Just for one person to tell the truth, about what occurred on Nov 22, 1963.

That can never happen.

jk

***

(After a synagogue shooting the survivors requested the President not come to memorial.)

Please wait

Don’t bring the Secret Service,

the NRA,

the black armored vehicles

the rooftop scopes

Please wait

Don’t bring the hate for the huddled masses’ yearning or the lies

Don’t bring your birth certificate or

the ghost of your fascist father

Please wait

Don’t bring your immigrant wife

don’t bring the daughter who turned her back

looking forward to skiing vacations,

the children abandoned in cages

forsaken

through your inhumanity

Please wait

Leave behind your princely son, who does the sword dance with our enemies

Please wait

Don’t mumble a prayer with a prompt from Siri

or Google the sacred tradition at the last minute or read from prepared remarks

Please wait:

we don’t counterpunch at a funeral

or send the migrant ship back

or close our hearts at borders

Please wait to capitalize

to dominate a scene of loss

to dishonor the past

Please wait

jk

10/30/18

***

Our Mall Shooting

1. Our mall shooting wasn’t a very big one. It’s not going to mean much to the public at large, I suppose: only two people wounded.

But the following occurred just down the road from me- where my wife used to work every day. Right by our food court, where everyone hangs out.

“It was like, ‘pah, pah.’ Then it was a pause. Then it was, ‘pah, pah, pah, pah, pah,'” said staff Sgt. Isaiah Locklear who was working at the recruiting office when the shooting happened. He said he ran towards the commotion and saw a 16-year-old boy who had been shot in the stomach.

“He was laying on the floor, waving his arms. ‘I’ve been shot.’ He’s like, ‘Please. Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die. That really hit me.’ He didn’t want to die. I was telling him he wasn’t going to die. I was going to stick with [him] through it,” Locklear said.

That’s the tv reporter’s description of a shooting at the Tanforan mall where my wife used to work, until recently. It was only a month ago, July 2nd.

That was just a week before the Gilroy shooting, which is already receding from media memory- Gilroy, where I have family.

That’s two shootings a week apart that could have impacted my life. Ok, that did impact my life. We are just so good at moving past these incidents now.

The Tanforan incident was not a mass shooting, but a level of gunfire that evacuated the mall and sent a search along the commute route of the rapid transit- and so affected the entire community.

My wife had recently transferred to another department store, and the feeling was hard to repress that things could have been far worse.

***

2. So I want to say something about retail.

Americans, the workers in your stores are under fire in several ways.

These precious jobs are drying up as the tech industry transforms retail into a fully automated impersonally robotic world.

And the workers in those dwindling jobs in department stores that still exist are underpaid, as most workers are, in an overvalued, hyper economy.

So, have you heard whether the victims of the El Paso shooting were workers? Or how a shooting permanently impacts a work environment?

No, because we are conditioned not think in terms of workers and workers’ rights and the well-being of workers.

Workers are expendable. That is the unspoken subtext of this tragedy.

That is why Congress won’t act. Because, for them, you don’t exist.

When the stores and the retail jobs disappear people who can, will buy things, through Amazon perhaps, and so feel insulated from danger.

But those jobs are disappearing- and they are not being replaced.

Mall shootings? Workers’ ability to make a living, to work in a safe environment-it’s not an issue that Congress is worried about.

Do you know that stores are safe havens for the homeless? That those with no place to go find department stores, for warmth, a bathroom, a hiding place, a momentary shelter – and no policing can solve the myriad impacts on that work environment?

So the few workers are sheltering-unwillingly -the many homeless. A symbiosis, of sorts.

No, the homeless and the American worker don’t exist for the US Senate, or the bankers and hedge funds and people in Admin and Finance.

These won’t be the last shootings in a shopping mall. Not until there isn’t a mall, or a store or a retail center with people in it to serve you.

I’m glad my wife is ok, I thank god my Gilroy kin were unharmed. I’m horrified, as is everyone, at the news of more gun violence, every day and in every way. Including murder and suicide.

We aren’t divided on this issue- despite what gun advocates say. They say that whatever we decide to do won’t work.

They’re wrong.

***

Oh here’s a fun fact: the shooters in our mall- they were just kids. Sixteen years of age, and fifteen. So only a potential mini-massacre; it really doesn’t count. Already forgotten.

Kids with guns. Is that in the Second Amendment too?

***

Note to Self:

I don’t wish to offend any animals but.

Did you hear?

The Elephant is leaving the GOP.

Elephant would like to be removed from political logos due to centuries of gun violence against elephants.

Yes. The elephants know all too well.

Usually animals take no stand on political matters, by minding their own business.

Times have changed.

Other animals have refused to be Republican Party mascots:

Snake

Porcupine

Skunk

Jellyfish

Dung Beetle

Buzzard

Junkyard Dog

Chicken

Termite

Cockroach

Lizard

Slug

Animals that object to being hunted down like humans (such as Wolf) have stood with Elephant against gun violence.

They are too numerous to list here. But they know gun violence can pretty much destroy paradise.

WAAG. Wild Animals Against Guns. They have neither website nor social media.

They do have feelings- and intelligence; it was the animals that originally taught humans what to eat and how to survive. They know a lot. We should listen.

***

Lions have asked not to be stuffed and displayed in your penthouse. Thank you.

-So far we have 90% of the humans, and all of the animals, against gun violence and for common sense.

(No animals were harmed in the making of this public service announcement.)

Looking through a crate of poems. This one was

“on the presidential debate” -it was october, and a war was going on.

So here’s an old poem from the last war, about a Presidential debate.

***

My Debate

…I understand the President’s speech after 911

I understand it.

…To change the world, throw it all forward, everything at stake-

I understand it.

…I understand the philosopher’s dilemma:

To change the world through ethics seek justice, everything at stake-

I understand it.

…The victim’s cry

I understand it

To throw it forward so all can hear-

I understand it.

…My place in the world

I understand it

my push toward truth let go the lie-

I understand it.

…The call of the World

I understand it

To throw it forward sight unseen

I understand it.

10/10/2004

Walrus -and the Democrat.

a doggerel from the last war

(10/11/2006)

To the tune of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

Republicans and Democrats were walking arm in arm

“A little conflict far away shan’t do us any harm.”

Said Republican to Democrat, “I know what we shall do. We’ll bomb a nation far away from peaceful me and you.”

“‘Twas them that attacked-not we,” concurred his Democratic friend, though who ‘they’ were eluded, as to whom and why and to what end.

“Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, they look alike to me.

“Let’s bomb them all,” said Democrat,

“and peaceful we shall be.”

A peaceful world and safer, for moms and apple pies

“I do love apple pie” said Repub as he did amble by.

“Mom’s a saint- she’d love us for the peaceful things we do,”

said Democrat. “After all I’d rather fight them there, than here near peaceful me and you.”

“Fight them there in old Iraq, it should be very pleasant.

It’ll take a week or maybe two, just like hunting pheasant.”

“Republicans and Democrats, we do it for our own protection.

And anyone who disagrees might lose the next election.”

And off they went contented at their mutually assured contention

that military force be used to make a peaceful intervention-

upon the world and its children to make a safer place

though the only place of safety may be in outer space.

A million sons and daughters went to fight the peaceful war

One out of five, or 20 percent was wounded, dead, -or more.

But peaceful day and happy had Repubs and Dems back home.

It’s time to rest from thinking, how hungry they’d become!

“What’s for lunch, Republican?”

asked Democrat so meekly.

“You tell me, oh Democrat,”

replied Republican discreetly.

“No you decide,” said Democrat, not wishing to offend.

And here we leave the peacemaking friends

for here our poem must end.

***

This was a poem for Cindy Sheehan whose son was killed in Iraq. She became an anti- war activist, vilified by Republicans. From my memory box.

“When did your life become not a mirror” ( a poem for Mrs Sheehan)

When did your life become,

not a mirror, but a refuge

a quiet place of lake and grasses

Clouds, alright, and white caps, where your leaves drift down and dapple,

not this trick of ingenuity, mirror against mirror?

The lake itself, a cloud,

and grasses,

global facts beyond dispute-

the godly imaginary moment,

life’s garden beginning

was a time before politics

and now this-

a moment of death, you’d think finality but…

When did your life become

a breath with others breathing

just the breeze touching the surface, that’s all.

Was this war’s gift,

the quiet lake and grasses, if only within you,

and if only for a moment?-

but a moment when

all wars cease.

To place a mirror face down gently on the table by the window-

that’s a revolutionary act.

jk

6-2-07

***

“A Small Matter of the Truth”

Redwood Rhapsody

It’s a gorgeous September morning. Fall is imminent, with all its unexpected drama of falling leaves and explosions of color. In Northern California, the best weather can be had in mid-September, in the shifting Indian Summer that brings warm sunshine, heat and perfect evenings. You’re panning for gold and it comes in September.

The vacation is over for most Americans, so the tourism thins in mid-September. I go north up Highway 101 with a private, sneaky kind of pleasure, knowing I’ll have the gold hills, the mottled forest drive, the enormous vistas mostly to myself. I stake my claim and tell no one. I can stay in small towns like Ukiah or Willets if I get tired of driving, and find a cool motel room and kick back. And in the morning, I’ll go to the redwoods.

If one drives north from San Francisco, one can visit the redwoods, and this is the best time of year. They are our crowning achievement, though we had nothing to do with their creation. They belong to us, and they fill us with pride of place and wonder. There is nothing like them on earth. These are our redwoods, called coast redwood, sequoia sempervirens: forever living.

They stand like towers of austere beauty all along the north coast, though just a bit inland, where they can gather enough calm and fog to make them happy for a thousand years or two.

A thousand years?- More. Fifty million years would comprise the timeline of the former world in which these giants dwelled supreme, dominating the entire continent. The redwoods were everywhere in the primeval landscape- They ruled in peace.

Impervious to fire, immune to disease, knowing no significant threat whatsoever, they sprouted upward, utopian, three hundred feet high, creating a canopy that filtered the sun into natural groves of shade and darkness, making them the perfect friend of the tiniest forest dwellers.

Spiders spin delicate webs in the corrugated bark; bats nest within their trunk hollows, while dinosaurs walked by in ages past. My personal favorite inhabitant is the big raven, whose scratchy old caw echoes throughout the place, a sound like rubbing an old gourd with a stick- a sound I know was heard just the same eons ago. The same peace, the same place.

The raven and the redwood seem to have a special rapport, its caw echoes so evocatively, so mysteriously, in the groves. It echoes around the secluded place and is the sound of its memory. I know this raven knows all the stories, and still reports the latest news in the grove.

If you go to the redwoods, to a place like Richardson Grove, you may as well just bring yourself and leave your camera behind. It will only distract you.

Here the trees stand like staves, in giant ranks all around you, so tall you can’t get them in a picture. And the sun bathes the place in shafts of quiet and light. It can’t be photographed. You’ll just have to memorize it. Scores of two thousand year old trees, their eminence, their peace, all around you on a September morning. Try to allow it all to effect your psyche, so that later you may remember, and so you can daydream about it when you need to.

Funny, that among these trees you find yourself face to face with their feet, so you gaze into the patterns of bark. We’re small, they’re tall. That’s just the way it is. The redwood bark has a sculpted quality, as though loving hands passed down, leaving furrows with each fingerprint, pleased with its finality.

I find myself looking for my favorite bark. Some are golden, some a lighter gray, like ash, and these look museum quality to me. There are primeval, dark trees too, with blackened bark from fires a generation ago, or a century; from the stunted trunk a giant candelabra formation rises like a wooden torch held aloft- a new tree or two, or more, held suspended by the former trunk of the old, the structure of which endures to support the whole.

Some bark looks virile, I must admit. And some are haggard. I scout the oldest trees, which have a stone-like austerity.

Once, after riding the old logging Skunk Train through the forest, I asked a resident what she liked best about the redwoods, and her answer has to do with the bark. She said the bark of redwood has the powdery red particles, for which the redwood is named, and when rains come, all that red washes down the streets- but reflects gold when the sun breaks through. “The streets turn to gold,” she said. Good answer, I thought.

Standing at the base of the greatest tree ever, the foot of which is so like an elephant’s- you just can’t believe it: it’s living, and it stands, and, massive, thirty feet around, in diameter, flat at ground level, it grips the earth with its very treelike knuckles, but beneath the surface the root system is very shallow. The tree just begins, shoots straight up as high as you can see, without pretense.

It is an irony that the great redwood is most vulnerable at its base. Human footsteps too near may impact the ground around the roots, compacting the soil, making it hard for the roots to breathe, We unwittingly harm these trees when we draw near them. I know I harm these trees. They are delicate, sensitive. I am certain they know not only my car exhaust, but my human breath, and must somehow be aware of my presence, perhaps even of my thoughts.

But look up, traveler. That’s what we are here for. The whole deal with the giant redwoods is their enormous height. You stand at the foot and look up in vain to find the crown, which is lost among the foliage, it’s needley green complexity ‘way up there, four hundred feet above. Up, up, up- well over a football field straight up, as one writer points out to the earthbound among us.

And beyond is the bright blue sky, and there the topmost branch, in an aura of golden green, glories in triumph, meeting the sun, lording over the landscape, greeting the elements of the natural world from an absolutely unique outpost. You go there. You imagine the prospect and you go, imaginatively. This gentle giant of a tree beckons you to think about the view from up there. And a whole chorus of trees equally tall stands all around you. Every treetop crowns the atmosphere, as it has for centuries and centuries, going back in time.

Brave loggers felled the big trees. And sometimes nature brought them down, through washouts. But glacial epochs had much to do with the near extinction of coast redwood everywhere but here. Here on this September morning, where I stand among them.

In our time, we use the fallen as a timeline, counting the tree trunk’s rings back through human history. Particularly famous attractions we note with a pin: the date of the Declaration of Independence (a living thing happening!) – there is a ring for that; back to Magna Charta,a deeper ring; the Roman Empire; the birth of Jesus, still more concentric rings, into the tree’s core. The tree’s rings register even earlier events- In terms of the chainsaw, it is an unwilling disclosure on the part of the tree, nonetheless translated to laptop, and now to thee.

The tree rings give one an idea of just what California was up to at the time, growing this very tree, among other things. When Romans were building and losing their distant empire, there was quiet in this grove, when this particular tree was young.

Once in the redwoods up in this place called Prairie Creek, I saw a little herd of elk standing in the gravelly riverbed. Fascinated, I went back to the spot at dusk and watched the elk rise up like spirits from their resting place, awaken into movement, and slowly, methodically, gather to move into the foggy upper reaches of the redwood forest. In the daylight I was somewhat shocked, for they were looking back at me: I was the object, not them. But here I stood unnoticed at dusk by the riverside in the gloom.

And then the elk gave forth an awe- inspiring bugle call as though through those long ancient mountain horns of Tibet, and it screeched out it’s shrill breath and echoed throughout the region. I felt it in the core of myself, in the ground of my being, and it scared me, the sound was so very primeval.

This language predates Man. And the call then was returned from the fastness of the hills, sonorous, shrill, this crazy elk call of nightfall.

And the elk will go in peace to some unknown place and observe Night as it has existed for eons. I’d heard something that has to do with the beginnings of what I think of as Time, and the fallen redwood tells of similar things.

Once, near the Avenue of the Giants, I took a path away from the sunlit trail and found myself in a really creepy old growth of trees. Ferns everywhere, black old patriarchal/ matriarchal redwood trees, thousands of years old, frowning down at me; old hunks of forest impenetrable all about, and darkness and crows squawking, and I realized I was getting too close to the edge of my Time Period. I wasn’t far from the path, but this was plenty primeval for me. I think of this place only when I am safe in bed, under warm covers.

You can see ghost redwoods, too. The children of the old tree stand in a circle, for they grew as sprouts from its center. Sometimes the middle tree dies, finally, after many centuries, and may fall, and over time be swept aside, decay, leaving the empty space around which the young trees stand, now grown and towering above you in the grove.

The position of giant trees, which stand around the central empty space, infers the history going back to a time one can’t see. Perhaps a fallen trunk is a thousand years old: it supports life today, and promotes life as it decays. That is nothing new. But once the tree was a mere sapling.

I brought such a coast redwood sapling back with me. It was one inch tall. Perhaps it too will live to be two thousand years old. If it grows we will plant it and that will be a memory tree to someone who lived and is now gone. As I write this, I wonder how ancient that very thought is, that the spirit of someone you lost would live on in an eternal tree like a redwood.

Who knows, there might be an ancient piece of redwood in your deck, or more likely shingles, furniture, sequoia sempervirens, part of your house. It was plentiful at one time. Seemed endless, that time.

There is the sunlit majesty, and there is the darkest edge at which one ponders the beginnings of Man. And there is daily life in September in the dawn of a century. The dawn redwood knows all of this, I’m certain.

So drive back home through the Avenue of the Giants, seemingly endless regiments of three hundred foot trees passing by. Do the math on their cumulative age and then give up: there are too many years involved in forest time.

And when I asked the redwoods about time they replied, “What time? There is no such thing. How old am I? I am new today, though I stand for 1500 years, I am new today!”

I drive, piano music on in my comfortable rental car, and soon I’ll be out of this ancient place and back in San Francisco, having a latte.

One night I had a dream. I loved the redwoods so much I dreamt the perfect redwood tree! It stood tall against the sky alone, enormously tall – incredible. It was pure and bright, the bark slightly luminous, made of dream stuff, and the redwood stood out against the brilliant night sky of my dream. And by the tree stood a little house. Secure. And by the house and the tall redwood tree, a familiar path. Familiar. And that was all. I woke up overjoyed, for I had found it. The eternal tree, sequoia sempervirens, ever-living, that I could go to at any time. It was in my mind, my psyche. It’s there forever. I am right there now. And you can go there too.

james koehneke

San Francisco

September 10, 2003 (Written as a kind of mental postcard to Californians who died on Flight 93, at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept 11, 2001.)

Pumpkinalia:

A Pumpkin Prose Rhapsody

He walks on long vine-like legs, clad in pinstripes, hatless in holiday garb, his orange countenance, his serrated smile (a pumpkin for a head) relates him stylistically to the scarecrow, with rags and ribbon blowing in the autumn air.

Or he rides a midnight steed and might hurl his melon in a grinning lapse of judgement- grinning, spinning in a fiery arc of orange and pumpkin seeds, with a hyena laugh that issues from who knows where, for Jack’s lantern has no larynx. He is hollow on Halloween. His is a silly sacrifice, a trick on the gods, as if to say “we’ve something luminous, precious afire for thee, come see, come see…”

Pumpkins of various sizes, by twos and threes on doorsteps, are gaping and leering like Three Stooges, smirking and scowling like Little Rascals. The dramatis personae of Pumkinalia lacks depth, of not variety and novelty.

Yes, bewitched and bewildered, he sits on a table top, resting on newspaper, amid spattered guts, as with nip and tuck, and the practiced art of carving, he arrives at his present state. Hacked from the spinning vine, trucked to the city, then carved by your ever-loving mom, voila’: Mr Jack O’Lantern, at your service.

I’m pondering pumpkinology, wondering what exactly animates the fad for faces on this inert and wonderful plant form. What gives it legs? How does it come to be that a vegetable goes from simple and seedy to sprite? What pumpkinetic forces, what pumpkinomics are involved?

Walking with an old friend (and near to the season) I brought up the subject of Halloween and asked about the old days in Takoma, where he’s from. I tried to be subtle. “About pumpkins…they don’t pop out of the ground orange, do they?”

I was almost sorry I asked. He looked positively shocked at my ignorance. And then, instead of waxing favorably on pumpkin lore, he changed the subject to the harvest time he remembered, of cucumbers and squashes, and pickles and preserves, all stocked in the old root cellar in the country home in which he grew up.

I didn’t realize that he was outlining Jack O’Lantern’s family tree- or vine, more properly.

The botanical genus is cucurbitaceae. It includes the vines of squashes and cucumbers, watermelon, edible gourds; these are the pumpkin kith and kin.

The thought of the old root cellar reminded me of the basement of my grandmother’s house, with its coal chute, and dusty photos in giant frames of our dour-looking nineteenth- century relatives. The place was probably haunted, the coal chute a relic of an earlier era. Spooky.

But a family get-together of Pumpkin’s root-cellar relations would be quite lively, I think, with the fat watermelon and the cool cucumber, sweet honeydew melon and pickles…That pumpkin party would be chill with a dill.

I assume the prolific zucchini would be included among Pumpkin’s pictures on the mantle, and there would hardly be room for all the squashes with their sad complexions, brave and gnarly, and, to the human eye “mis-shapen”-but no doubt beloved amongst the Cucurbits.

A book of symbols I have at hand calls the pumpkin “stupid”- reports that pumpkins symbolize a lack of brains. Yes, if the pumpkins and squashes and pickles ran around on cartoon legs hither and thither, I would agree: that would be silly. But folklore is both kind and cruel, and just now the pumpkin is the Lord of Gourds. His admittedly day-old dignity is sufficient to command some respect, though he be leering and sputtering, spitting wax from a weak candle, or illuminated only by a cheap electric bulb.

Jack Pumpkinhead, a character in L Frank Baum’s Marvelous Land of Oz, when asked about his native intelligence, responded quite reasonably that “it is all in the seeds”.

In Jack I found a very good example of a pumpkin’s adaptation to the needs of the folk. Oz fans know he was little more than a body of hickory sticks with a big ol’ pumpkin for a head, and a very winsome expression indeed.

Magic dust brought him to life, Jack Pumpkinhead, and, according to Baum, he may be found idly snapping seeds outside the door to his cozy pumpkin house. Periodically he must replace his pumpkin head. He selects a new one from his very own pumpkin patch, grown for the purpose, and he fashions his own face before putting it on.

We see there is something inherently good in the pumpkin species, which the author has picked up on.

I tried to find out more about pumpkins from books,but the nature-magic of pumpkins was inadequately discussed in the various encyclopedias and guides. I learned that the lucky pumpkins rest comfortably on shingles so as not to spoil their shiny skins.

I learned, too, that pumpkins like about one hundred days of weather- especially sun. They like laying in the hot sun, day in and day out, doing nothing but growing plump and round as they deepen in color. Moonlight is required as well, and moist nights, and a wide field. The mystery includes darkness, and various microbial and morbid destinies involving compost and rot.

Your sunny outsides depend upon a bacterial underground, with carbons and nitrates and manure maybe, and dead leaves, and somebody’s old lunch and who knows what all, Mr Pumpkin?

Old barns and basements, root cellars and sheds, scarecrows and fence posts catch the first sight of you. Those are a few of your favorite things, Mr Jack O’Lantern.

Out of the darkness of the cold ground, nurtured by nature and mothered by mulch, yes, your shiny orange brightness has something to do with dark forces, microscopic and moonlit, where the chemical components go on unabated, until the breathing earth heaves ever so slightly to put forth the little sprig of a vine.

Equally strange and miraculous are the daytime phenomena. Out of the green vine with its climbing tendrils spears a yellow flower, which drops to the ground; other yellow flowers attract the pollinating bees, and so from the striated vine that twines the plant to earth, in the late summer of heat and sun, comes the orange product, nature’s brand, at last blended with the autumn colors of the changing leaves.

Tillers of the soil await the hundred days and nights of Pumpkin-tide, until at last the time is right. Jack O’Lantern, you have arrived- the grandest gourd in all of Nature.

Rotund, no pot contains you. Heaped up, you roll lazily off the wagons and it takes a village- and a forklift- to bring you up properly, that is, to champion-size, to be judged according to the competitive standards of the august World Pumpkin Confederation.

I can easily visualize my friend Jack Pumpkinhead, with his polka dot shirt, big buttons, and red vest, straightening his tie, off to see this Pumpkin Jamboree.

Let’s do a pumpkin call, a shout out, shall we?

Hey Frosty! Hey Funny Face! Hey Big Autumn! Hey Jack Pot! Hey Jumpin’ Jack! Hey Casper! Hey Baby Boo! Hey Munchkin! Hey Spooktacular! Hey Big Max! You too, Cinderella, Lumina, the elegant moon- white pumpkin, and you, great Atlantic Giant!

These are the many types of pumpkins, well known to pumpkinographers the world over.

Personified, the pumpkin participates in the old folk tale of Jack of the Lantern who trapped the devil in a tree, and let him down on the condition that he, Jack, would be free from Hell eternally. Unable to gain admittance into Heaven, Jack of the Lantern wanders, and the fire of the pumpkin is the light of his lantern.

So in springtime we sing tra-la tra-la, but by autumn our tune has changed. With the onset of gasping winter it is the fire we attend, and we contain the spirit in a lantern and thus keep body and soul together and shoo away the wandering spooks.

When autumn bonfires once lined the hilltops from an ancient land, and children lay down for warmth in smoking heaps of peat, the tale of Jack O’ Lantern may have had its beginning, centuries ago. Who knows? But even in modern times I see that our fairy tale turns back into a pumpkin before long, and our autumn mysteries are still rooted in the earth.

As my friend Jack says, “It’s all in the seeds.”

james koehneke

San Francisco

(happy halloween!)

*****

post script:

Been searching for a word that rhymes with orange

practically since the day I was bornge

that’s why I look so forlornge

But they say life’s full of roses and thornge!

Or:

There was an arrogant young pumpkin

He really though he was sumpkin’

He put on such airs

At the country fairs

The mean squashes then gave him a thumpkin!

Or:

Like when a pumpkin sees an icicle

he cries

“I’m havin a mid-life crisicle!”

Two nickelodeon theater lobbies

Our nickelodeon closed just recently. Aardvark Books in San Francisco was the site of a nickelodeon ca 1917. Note the ornate pressed tin ceiling. We visited the silent film museum today, a nickelodeon from 1913, in Niles, near Fremont CA.

“The nickelodeon was the first type of indoor exhibition space dedicated to showing projected motion pictures. Usually set up in converted storefronts, these small, simple theaters charged five cents for admission and flourished from about 1905 to 1915.” wiki

The historian here gave a really nice talk but he started by asking if I knew what vaudeville was.

You know you’re getting older when you’re really familiar with something that’s a hundred years old.

We knew vaudeville because it was the variety show format of early tv, and the performers were all vaudevillians. Especially Red Skelton and Mickey Rooney and Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Ed Sullivan. All the corny jokes, the pantomime and pratfalls, the song and dance- straight from vaudeville a hundred years ago.

It’s interesting to see a cultural memory fade, although internet preserves a history, it’s probably a reach for people of this century to think about entertainment in 1913.

The brilliant cartoons we saw as kids also drew from vaudeville, expanding on themes and jokes and stereotypes of the era. Bugs Bunny was very vaudevillian.

Nickelodeon’s that exist:

A trip to the silent film museum in Niles reminded me of another nickelodeon that almost made it to now: The Blue Church at 28th and Church St.

It took me a minute to remember this one.

“The Rita Theatre was a little neighborhood theatre on the northwest corner of 28th Street and Church Street.”

“A theatre was constructed at 28th and Church Streets in 1916, and was known by the names Rita, New Rita, and the Princess. It was the old type nickelodeon, with piano playing to accompany the silent films.”

Mae Silver ( Foundsf)

The SF Examiner’s Thomas Gladysz provides more details:

“The Searchlight Theatre opened in 1916. Admission at the time was 10 cents for adults, and 5 cents for children. Its August 5th Grand Opening advertisement (reproduced in Tillmany’s book) boasted a “New Theatre, Good Pictures, Latest Music.” The ad went on to state “We are installing one of the latest models of the AMERICAN PHOTOPLAYER, with all the Orchestral effects at a cost of $5000. Be sure to see and hear it.” That was big money during the early silent film era.”

“It opened as the Searchlight Theatre on August 5, 1916, and changed names rapidly the next few years. It was variously known as the Empress Theatre (1918-1927), the Lux Theatre, the De Lux Theatre, the Isis Theatre, the Princess Theatre, the Church Theatre, and, finally the Rita Theatre (1945). That name seemed to stick, but in 1961, entrepreneur Ward Stoopes took it over and ran it for about four years as the Del Mar Theatre.

Never successful as a neighborhhod theatre, its only means of survival seemed to be as an outlet for “ethnic” films, i.e. foreign films WITHOUT English sub-titles, usually German or Russian. Its last days as a film theatre were in May 1965. It became a neighborhood church, painted a bright, bright blue, and known as the ‘Blue Church. It was demolished in October 2009. Condominiums and retail will be built on the site.”

(cinematreasures)

http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Fairmount_Heights

“I remember all the food lines outside the blue church and how the nuns all in white contrasted so sharply and beautifully with the paint. It was clear it hadn’t always been a church.

I’m going to share this post with Theater Architecture.”

-“I remember the free bread on tables outside on Sundays.”

https://burritojustice.com/2009/10/12/church-st-blues/

on an unrelated note:

Farewell to the wash and dry at Cole and Carl across from The Other Cafe. I was apartment hunting in the bulletin board there 40 years ago and someone told me there was an apartment on Upper Downy St top of Ashbury. Rent was $210 /month for a railroad flat with five rooms and a kitchen with garden backlots. Split it with my best friend. 2 hippies in a five room flat. Now that fateful laundromat is gone forever and so is reasonable rent.

Right across the street was the Other Cafe. Our hangout. Saw Kate Wolf and Nina Gerber, Cheap Suit Serenaders without R Crumb, Ducks Breath, Dana Carvey as John Denver. Jane Dornaker hung out there too. The neighbor in the flat upstairs used to make big pots of gumbo.

http://www.theothercafe.com/

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9B499CCF747A571C

Echo of Vaudeville

The Immaculate Kitchen

I knew a man who longed for contemplation.

He told me he intended to move to a monastery in a remote place. Up north. He pointed with his thumb, up.

He told me contemplation was one of the foundations of deeper spirituality.

It was mysticism. He would go to the remote Catholic monastery and develop a practice of contemplation as a response to this crazy world.

A few years later I saw him again and he was so angry. I said, how was the monastery? Was it in remote mountains by a hot spring? Was it by the sea with seagulls crying above the surf? Did you eat simple meals in silence?

He said “No. When I joined the monastery I found the same politics there I was running from everywhere else. The power struggles. The big egos. The same bullshit was there that is everywhere else.”

He was mad. It was a tremendous letdown.

…

-Are you compassionate? I ask myself.

Are you in your monastery, and is the same shit there that is everywhere else?

If so, I tell myself to take the next step.

What is that next step, anyway?

Be compassionate, I remind myself. (You are compassionate, whether you know it or not. It’s a capacity, a potential. It’s available.)

Ask what’s important. Forgive, I say to myself. Be forgiven. (It hurts so bad!)

Put people first- (on a trial and error basis- because I am human.)

****

Once I went to Orr Hot Springs and stayed overnight. It’s in a pocket of a canyon up in the mountains. Lovely.

You bring your own food and they have a kitchen there that is famous. It’s immaculate.

New shiny steel prep areas and refrigerators and a massive oven. You’re supposed to go there and make gourmet vegetarian meals yourself. And stay in the Japanese -style hostel overnight.

So I brought my yogurt and whatnot.

I just made myself yogurt and granola because, what I know about cooking?

So I gathered my stuff after breakfast and left a little drop of my corner-store yogurt on the prep counter.

All around me ex- hippies were making tofu stir fries and baking banana bread. Amazing.

So I left, but when I returned hours later after the kitchen closed and was cleaned and empty and the hippies were soaking in the hot spring, I looked at the counter of the immaculate kitchen and my little drop of yogurt I dripped was still there.

In the immaculate hippy kitchen all had been perfectly cleaned to zen perfection including and/or except my little tiny yogurt mess. It was about the size of a dime, but stood out on the counter like a cymbal dropped during a silent part of a symphony.

For me to, hopefully, return and clean up.

I have to laugh: I’m still suffering. I’ve made a mess. It’s the same shit everywhere. It hurts so bad! It’s as true today as ever.

That’s like my mantra.

There’s a moral here somewhere for me.

****

The life of compassion is not easy. We bring ourselves, and wait a minute, who keeps leaving their coffee cup on the table?

For crying out loud please pick up your coffee cup.

And remember compassion.

And what is important.

I say to myself.

I love you, fellow human beings. Have a nice day, by that I mean a beautiful day of peace and fulfillment.

And the coffee cup? I may or may not pick it up.

Work in progress, let’s say.

***

Everyday Life in an Ancient World

I went to an energy work thing once and the clairvoyant said do you have a thing for the gospels? Because you might have been back there then.

Maybe. I do know that the disciples, of a certain ancient religious order I won’t name, the men and women who belonged to it, did not get along very well.

The women bugged the men, because the women were actually better at it, and the men were in disputes over who should be in charge after the Lord, um, left. And a lot of further details still had to be worked out.

There were two leaders, after the ladies were shown the door.

And one leader was tougher than the nice traditional leader who they called “Beloved” or sometimes just “His Brother.”

“Beloved” was also shown the door- this was during the terrible uprisings in the world at the time.

So in my life, in my work, in my country, I see bitter disputes, and I of course jump right in, and then I stop.

And I look around and wonder.

What?

What do we do now?

****

Back in the days of no comfortable sandals, disputes were resolved in an ambiguous way.

We dined together. Said prayers. Glowered at each other. Muttered from The Sayings, with a certain tone of voice.

Pass the bread. I’ll have some more wine.

But I noticed that the Lord slept so well at night.

He’d get up, yawn and stretch and smile and say:

“Good morning, my beloved brothers and sisters!”

Not sure how he did that. It’s kind of a Miracle, if you really think about it.

So maybe I’ll practice that.

Good morning my beloved brothers and sisters.

Oy. That was weak. But it’s a beginning.

jk

(This is a project, the goal of which I didn’t grasp until I had written this phase, which uses the journalist George Plimpton symbolically as a truth seeker, or truth teller.

Truth tellers are currently under attack in this political era which is charged with highly volatile propaganda.

Plimpton is our Orwell. We should know about him. And he ought to be reclaimed and remembered.

Authenticity, I realize- that is the essay I should have written, as a counterforce to the incessant untruth we are subjected to daily.

***

A note about performance.

I do like speaking these little texts aloud. They speak to me.

In a sense this is a little performance piece. It’s cryptic, I know. Its thought is not fixed, and that is a good thing.

I know, Plimpton doesn’t get to say anything here. He is just in existence.

(photo by Nancy Wong, via Wiki)

***

The Day I Met George Plimpton:

-Artificial Intelligence and Real. The Journalists of Participation

1. The Machines are Listening

(George Plimpton was a prominent journalist, a founder of the New Journalism, participatory journalism, and founding editor of Paris Review. I met him briefly in 1993 when I worked at a little used bookstore in San Francisco. We exchanged a few sentences.)

Disclaimer:

In this era of contentious dialogue, I wish to assure others that I write to you, but not at you, and my assertions are mainly addressed to myself. When I say “you” I really mean “me” and vice versa, with the exception that when I say “me” I also mean “me”.

I promise to not presume anything whatsoever about who you are, or what you know or do not know, or how you should think.

***

End of an Age of Reason:

When a person from a Totalitarian State comes to the US and points out that the indicators for that to come into being are here, that’s a problem.

Here she is, listen:

-“This is Putin’s tactic to silence media: first, compromat. Next, journalists start falling out of the windows or they are hit by bricks on the back of their heads in the street. Foreign journalists are not allowed to enter (happening in the US today.) This is what the hybrid war is: the war of narratives. Journalists and writers tell stories. Politics are all about stories. Independent media tells stories unwanted by tyrants. Tyrants kill stories and story tellers. Before our narrative is flipped, protest. We must gain sanity and dignity back before it is too late.”

-author, Zarina Zabrisky

***

Now, what was I saying about George Plimpton, an originator of a school of journalism, and a link to the inner lives of writers?

And what, if anything, does this have to do with “fake news”? And journalists being the “Enemy of the People”?

I have to admit something first, about reading.

I do a reading-like activity, that is, I read, I walk away. I re-read, I think about what I read. then, I’m forgetful, I have to recall what the writer was saying, all the connections she’s curated in the text, so I start over again with a meditation on the implications the world of its prose.

Then, before long, I’m on page one hundred. I’m already fulfilled and stimulated. I’ve spent quality time. I’ll get there, eventually, slowly slowly slowly.

Occasionally I read a book multiple times.

And often I don’t get past p. 39.

It’s sad but it’s also ok.

So you can pretty much take anything I write with a grain of salt. I’m not knowledgeable.

I was recently yelled at online. Can’t you read?

Umm.

It’s ok.

I say “it’s ok” often to assure you, (and by you I mean me) that the process, the living of the little life of a thought process has a way of its own, and if allowed to move, it will be. It’s not about expectations or goals.

I’m a child of the sixties: You do your thing and I’ll do mine.

***

This kind of reading which I’m describing changes the body of your thinking, I feel.

How could thoughts have a body?

They have form. That’s all I’m saying. And, if you’re alive, they have movement. Your thought can move.

I know it sounds weird but just try moving the arms of your thought. See what you can reach with the hands of your thought process all the way to your fingertips.

You can reach a very long way. For example, my thoughts reach all the way to Yosemite right now. Look, Bridal Veil Falls!

That’s right. Now reach down to the toes of your thoughts. There’s some crusty old opinions down there. I’m just speaking for myself now. Yikes.

Some scholars run thought/marathons. Some practice walking-thought meditations. They are professionals, though.

They challenge their thought. Their thought fires back. They and their thought talk quietly, weighing, considering, figuring.

Some thoughts are in the boxing ring. Some run like mad down a football field. Oh no, wrong direction!

It’s fine.

The idea is to not remain fixed. Rigidity is a problem. It can be reversed- until it’s too late. We won’t know if it’s too late -until it actually IS too late.

***

A sign of rigidity is the feeling that your most worn-out thought is precious. Your thought has turned to stone.

Your thought is so stonelike that a fine artist like Vija Celmans could take that thought and make of it a brass mold, as she did with stones she found on the beach, and repaint every feature of it so it looks exactly like the original thought and display it in a museum and then laugh and admit, as she did on a spontaneous appraisal of one of her painted simile stones, that “it looks like a turd!” (In a recent New Yorker profile of the artist.)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/vija-celmins-surface-matters

And sometimes you wonder that people don’t understand your thought, but they really just don’t want to break the news to you that your thought is dead. Look, they poke it with a stick.

See? Nothing. It ain’t moving.

It’s ok.

The painted stones and skies and waves of a Vija Celmans are amazing- but you know what I’m saying. Her stones report her experience in a unique way that involves what is. And that involves truthfulness.

…So, that day I met George Plimpton-

Oh, wait. I’ll finish this later. I have to go and serve my community. For pay. I’m not Mother Teresa.

jk

9/9/19

Continuing: I forgot to bring the robots!

The Day I Met George Plimpton: Artificial Intelligence -and the Human Kind part 2

Mr Plimpton came into our little unruly bookstore one clear Saturday night, with his lovely wife on his arm. Dapper couple, looked like they had just stepped off of a yacht. Beaming smiling, they looked around and George Plimpton said

“This is marvelous!”

2. Canticles of Computerware

Who is authentic, anymore?

Here in San Francisco, Andy Warhol was at the museum, not far from Vija Celmans.

I say Andy, because that’s what we have of Andy. His work is him, I feel.

We live in his Age. His imagery has leveraged stock, both financially and politically.

Poster screen art, huge. Larger than life, superseding everyday life in every way an image of limited dimension may.

The familiar, blown up, large. An engineering feat, everything looking exactly like everything. Now live and in color. So familiar I took no selfie.

Seen it a hundred times.

We live in an age of facsimile. In fact, last week I got in an argument with one. My fault. I strayed from the path of righteousness, and ended up talking to a troll.

Note to self: stay out of comment threads, dummy. They’ll eat you alive, insult your mother, trash your town -all from the comfort of a system of tubes and towers.

A sociopathic technology- That’s an amazing idea.

But back to Andy.

There’s Elvis. There, a revolver. And Marilyn. And listen, Velvet Underground. And there, Andy himself, with that holding-my breath -as-long -I can-look of his.

(Hey Andy, the robots are coming. They’re already here, the bots and algorithms. They’re facsimilizing people now.-soon everyone will BE one for 15 minutes.)

-Oh, and now, here, Donald.

Andy Warhol Talks about Donald Trump throughout the Mid-1980s

Donald, with his multicolored hair, always a new dye, sometimes hair the color of straw, yellow over pink, white, all fading into neutral nothingness; the agony of the blank wall and a forgotten frame.

Stencil psychedelic hair, a troubling wave of a combover, the effect of disharmony, of tints clashing on a color wheel. What is meant to be a wave of optimism is really an advertising for detergent.

Donald is so Andy! Andy as adjective.

A walking silkscreen cut- out collage of presidential detritus over time, including an authentic flag pin, and a lot of spilled ink. Thumbs up.

Hunter S Thompson used to cry out at the pathology of power in American society.

“How long, Lord?” the American Jeremiah, crying in the wilderness.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/01/ralph-steadman-interview-hunter-s-thompson-illustrator-retrospective-exhibition

A mass of blue opaque, the ubiquitous suit of a US President: the ever- present red tie, bled-through silkscreen at the edges, red and blue of Donald Trump oddly reminiscent of the flag pants of Jerry Garcia.

And now, thanks to a 3D printer and a ton of cable television social media, he’s pretty much everywhere.

Endless repetition. Slight variation.

He’s the most famous man the world!

Andy Andy Andy! What have you done?

(Could a machine do this?)

***

I work with a man from Tibet. He says Trump imagery reminds him of gigantic Mao propaganda.

When a person from a Totalitarian State sees the signs here, it’s a problem.

Journalists are under attack, writers.

Formerly writers like Plimpton, Joan Didion, Hunter S Thompson, Warren Hinckle flipped the script.

They left a trail: of authenticity.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

***

What is authenticity?

“…This is marvelous!”

Mr Plimpton, gazing about in approval at a little community space of books and filled with music.

“What is that marvelous music? Isn’t that wonderful, dear?” he said to his wife, also smiling.

Oh. Bluegrass music. That’s so funny to me now.

“We will have to come back.”

The many authors he brought to public attention are right over his shoulder on the shelves there. The many interviews in Paris review, authors explaining, explicating the craft. Back to Kerouac, Pound, Gertrude Stein. Mr Plimpton reaches back as an influence and editor to the time of Joyce and Fitzgerald, practically.

“Darling we’ll have to come back.”

Before the bookstore closes, and the book burnings begin, I savor this moment.

jk

9/10

A little Epilogue to my piece about Plimpton.

Trump called journalists “the fake news”. What is authenticity? Plimpton, on participatory journalism.

With Hemingway in Cuba and Bernstein in NY. And Edie and Andy Warhol too.

Mr. Seymour Glass

C/O The Museum of Television and Radio, W 52nd St New York, NY.

Dear sir,  

Please accept our if not profound at a minimum sincere condolences on the passing from the earthly plane of Mr. J.D. Salinger. The author’s recent translation to the hereafter has placed his readers and the principle subject of his books in an uncertain relationship, as if we’d met through a mutual friend now gone, and must bump into one another “accidentally” at the observances, be they religious in the conventional sense- Jewish ceremonials or Buddhist meditations on the Great Round of Being, or, more simply, over quiet coffee at a diner in Cornish NH if one exists, or any other suitably remote town in the USA- and, having bumped so must do two things: one, forget whatever we’ve heard with regard to the supposed “fictional” character, and two, think of the absolutely RIGHT thing to say to such a one, who will be, as a matter of course, Larger Than Life and yet as real as a cup of almost instant hardly palatable coffee; whatever stammered remarks by us would not defray the cost of one such cup in the days when coffee cost a nickel. Before my time, I know, before my time.I refer to you, Mr. Glass. You were the main character in many of the works of Mr. Salinger through his amanuensis and ghost-writer (and now I can use that term in every sense), Buddy Glass, your brother.I feel confidant we would recognize you without your shoes on, and that we would follow any strictures or admonishments to do the same, with regard to the removal or casting aside of shoes, hats, overcoats, up to and including the rending of garments, in honor of the Writer now gone to the Beyond. We feel that in common with other great artists tempted by the short but enviable stay in this vale of tears, you would fail to conceal your genius, and we would recognize you right away and we would approach you, or eddy toward you through the crowd, and then wonder what to say to prevent us from staring at you in wonder. You, “fictional character” Mr. Seymour Glass, will not know whether we had just realized we had locked ourselves out of the car, or whether we had something of pressing importance to ask about, or both.The troubling thing will be, as with the Passing of all Great Beings, (and all are great) the Immortality question in a somewhat inverted form, which will come up right away, I assure you.Here it is:Despite the fact that we may be certain that Mr. Salinger could be forgotten in Time, and would undoubtedly prefer it so, does the larger question hold with respect to the Immortality, the basic Life-Goes On-ness of his main characters?Though your own final chapter has been written, Mr. Seymour Glass, I think it safe to say that your memory, your being, the life of your character, begins again and again with every reading, and so it may be in life. We don’t know WHERE you are, but THAT you are is beyond question. And Franny, and Holden Caulfield, and the entire authorial progeny of Mr. Salinger, the same.Now that he is Gone, and we are given the chance to think it over, we are not sure we would accept a personal check from the Author without two forms of ID, but you, Mr. Seymour Glass, we embrace as family, no! more than family! For we didn’t give you monkey bumps or Indian burns, and have no amend to make. We just read the books and stories and myths and yadda yadda yadda and now we think we know it all: we have a hold on you, and you can’t escape, even though I see you looking for your shoes already.No Mr. Seymour Glass, Now it is one to one, mano a mano,  tete a tete with your readers.It is as though we found your letters in a drawer and read them DESPITE the warning label you put on everything as to what trouble would befall any who break seals 1- 7.And trouble did befall Mr. Salinger’s readers, whether they recognized it or not.

The readers of Salinger learned that a spiritual step may have Consequences.

Kafka said,” There is a point in every life beyond which there is no return- that is the point that must be reached.”

Those points in Salinger’s stories may be cataclysmic, in which a character’s basic faculties are at stake, or sense of sanity. Even the will to live may be superceded by some greater urge forward, beyond explaining.

We know this now.

And yet nothing ever is lost.

Somewhere the uncollected writings of J.D. Salinger exist, the great non-sequential pieces from the Typewriter Era. They include a somewhat less familiar letter from you, Mr Seymour Glass, which brave scouts know as “Hapworth 16, 1924.”

To read these is to return to a writer on a apparently unique level of American letters. The Glass family writings appeared at a time when some spiritual precepts middle-Americans now hold dear (at least in an NPR slash PBS sense) were quite unheard of: That meditation makes sense. That religions probably are reconcilable. That normalcy might be the face of God etc. etc. -these are now of the common parlance.

Today, no one would be shocked if they knew their next-door neighbor was studying yoga, or was a vegetarian, or had taken a Vow of Silence or whatever. I am not sure that was always the case- I know it wasn’t.  

And, too, Salinger’s concern with the post-traumatic stress of modern life was hard to grasp initially. Now we all have it, and sense it and no wonder.

We can’t thank Salinger for this, but we may guess that by participating in the life of his creations, (even if we are Too Shy or Not Smart Enough, or only Went to New York One Time and yadda yadda yadda) we can still ponder the koan about one hand clapping, though we now think we know that one already.

(Do we really?)

Speaking of which, I’m going to disclose to my friends the answer to one mystery that has always perplexed me, and, though my all-nighters with Buddy Glass are faraway in the past, the question has remained.

I have always wondered what, if anything, Mr. J. D. Salinger would have in his safe, in the way of writing- including poetry by YOU, Mr. Seymour Glass.

I know, I feel sure I know what it is in Mr. Salinger’s writing safe:

It is a handkerchief with YOUR monogram, “SG”.

You may have cried tears into that handkerchief, you may have blown your nose, you may have received it and never used it, or you may never have received it at all, but the poem is that it belongs to you, his main character, Mr. Seymour Glass.

Sometimes something commonplace brings us closer to what we seemingly cannot attain.

-In memory of the writings of the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger,

James K
SF CA
2/3/10.

 

   “President of Virtues”. (a poem):

 

President of Virtues

Buddha/not Buddha,

 

I heard your talk at

the jamboree/ the center-ground

of being

 

Oh Buddha/not Buddha: in perfection/misdirection

 

Your straight-talking speech so thoughtless, profane

Leads one toward the active silence of contemplation

 

You advocate petty gratuitous violence;

This shows me the way toward compassion

 

Your worship of all that is gold-plated and numerical and small

directs me toward the ten thousand things and the non- separation of all things. Truly we walk on holy ground every day.

 

You champion winners,

and so lead us to remember the begging bowl and the value of service.

 

Incontinent and profligate, you awaken within a desire for pure heart

that I might breathe in and out mindfulness

 

Oh Buddha/not Buddha!

President of Virtues!

You are the town drunk pointing at the moon /we pull you drowning from the river you’re pissing in/ mocking/ you remind me that

The imperfect tree survives the ax

 

President of Virtues

Buddha/not Buddha

Your disciples are clowns

Directing us toward

Seriousness of purpose,

The narrow path/no path

The truth /no truth

Integrity as it is.

 

Old, old Buddha/ not Buddha,

Fat president of golf clubs

your vigorous tongue is wagging

to remind us of the ancient parchment

The fine calligraphy

Of Liberty:

 

The imperfect tree survives the ax.

 

7/28/17

***

-My Supreme Courtyard

 

The hummingbirds agreed to return to my porch and converse with the color red

 

the tomato plant at my fence

agreed to grow, promising to tomato

 

and the eucalyptus grove on the hill has by mutual consent agreed to perform the interpretive dance that brings the wind and the windblown seed drifting about

 

The ocean, always busy plunging, yet still stands in support of more cormorants who honor the ancient rocks

 

and the fleet of pelicans are in formation commanded by no one to fulfill a conning role with respect to nature, carrying intelligence to the remote districts

 

Clouds and blue sky cooperate in summer and moist foggy air agrees to reach across the aisle to shake hands with the inland heat

 

morning afternoon and night have agreed to allow each expression in turn

 

and the midnight bullfrogs agreed that while it is disruptive to croak in the still pond at night keeping everyone awake, nothing ought to be done, noting in all fairness the quiet in the day, and the nonstop chirping of the birds in the dancing trees.

 

(6/27/18)

 ***

 

-Note to self:

 

Looking for the poem you lost

The poem is inside you

 

A library is out there elsewhere somewhere

But the poem isn’t there. Where.

 

Looking for the country you misplaced

The country is inside you

 

The border isn’t out there

Nowhere anyhow anyway anywhere

Anywhere. No.

 

Looking for the government you remember

The liberty and justice-

It’s inside you

(Or it’s nowhere anywhere)

 

Looking for. Looking for. Looking for.

 

(7/17)

 ***

 

-remember the artists that live on air alone

 

the morning clouds are not describable

but I knew someone who knew someone who could dance those clouds

 

a ballerina on a bus and that bus was driven by john cage

 

she traveled a dusty road

 

my intermediary just bade me listen

be open

 

the sky this morning is too blue to say

but I knew someone who knew someone who could perform and direct that blue

 

premier ballerina of the imperial ballet

1917

 

she traveled an arduous journey

 

my intermediary just bade me listen

 

be open

 

you may know someone who knows someone

 

the artists who struggle for bread

like morning birds

 

the clouds the ballerinas who stretch their legs a little hungry

 

remember the artists that live on air alone

 

(7/20/18

***

Neanderthal grandfather

 

We’re related

in a decimal landscape

somewhere in Germany

 

We co-wrote a poem of formal sequences:

The serrate mountain, and the time before naps

The pier of broken stones

 

-You, a mosaic of buried stems

a beloved fractured reassembly

-me, with the nightlight, wireless

 

You are out there somewhere

 

In dreams’ stillness

bridge,savannah

cloud and twisted arch

 

I join you in your library

glossary of stone

or the unwritten code

 

under our ledge of time:

our dna

thinking

 

earth is starry with transmissions now

satellite maps your resting place

 

You who figured out the flowers

and fragments

the work of the world without words

 

Neanderthal grandfather you had your nightlight of stars

 

We are slowly leaving language behind

on our way to where you are

 

(8/8/18)

 ***

***

Interpretive Dance!

To commemorate the release of the declassified documents relating to the JFK assassination, the Magic Bullet Theater will reenact, through  interpretive dance, the day when Abraham, Martin, John, Robert, Malcom, and 58,000 American serviceman, were cut down by a lone nut with a ricochet rifle. Music by the Dictaphones on an endless loop. 

jk

But That’s Just Me, Poems

A Campfire Song for Nervous Americans

 

Are you sensing a lack of urgency?

“We’ll do something eventually.”

– President, USA

 

Our Titanic’s hit its berg!

Our Hindenburg’s struck a spark!

Antarctica’s breaking up!

Internet’s going dark!

Ocean floor is sinking!

Sea level’s on the rise!

Thank God the Republican Party is in control

I’m sure they’re going to call the roll-

What grand plan will it devise?…

 

… I’m only hearing crickets

Little crickets by the fireside

Just the wind through the trees

The lonesome lack of bees

In my garden.

 

Things are getting really scary

That thing with Russia’s getting hairy

Natl security’s up for grabs

The body politic’s on the slab-

With the fate of me and you,

What are Republicans going to do?

Let’s listen to what they say:

 

(Long pause)

 

But …we’re only hearing crickets

Little cricket by the fireside

Just the wind through the trees

The lonesome lack of bees in the garden.

 

The ICBMs are flying

These times men’s souls are tryin‘

Superbugs are pumping iron

Armageddon sounds its siren

What’s a good Republican government going to do?…

 

(Long pause.)

 

…We are only hearing crickets (chirp chirp chirp chirp)

Little cricket by the fireside

Just the lonesome summer breeze

And the lack of honeybees in the garden…

7/20/17

***

The Donald Trump Commemorative March and Two-step.” Or “Wishful Thinking”

I am the president

and this is what I say

American values have prevailed

I tell you this fine day

Though the pleasure been all mine

The trips to Paris was divine

The G20 summit on the Rhine…

 

I tweet my resignation- yes I tweet!

I tweet my resignation- yes my freedom is so sweet!

 

An ex-president I shall be

A must distinguished former employee

A celebrity

In your TV!

Clinton Bush and Bush and Carter and now me!

 

I tweet my resignation-yes I tweet!

I tweet my resignation:

I’m on the sunny side of the street!

 

My next reality show will be

another version of the me

that you always knew and loved

-the CEO with iron glove!

I gotta be the me I’m meant to be

a gold plated name that shines from sea to sea

I brand that you will recognize

A steak that you will tenderize

A daughter who sells lots of shoes

A son in law who’s paid his dues…

 

I tweet my resignation yes I tweet!

 

I’m not really that guy you hired

I’m not interested in being fired

I see the writing on the wall

I’ll be waiting for Fox News to call…

 

Yes 140 characters I will punch

And then to mar a Lago for some brunch

A round of golf on my own course

And then a nap with no remorse

then soon Melania and I shall fly

To Trump Tower in Dubai

We’ll bid the Fake Media fond farewell

Mr Pence can pardon those who fell…

Etc

7/16/17

***

Kellyanne’s glove, Inaugural

-Please wait  (A President visits the synagogue site of mass shooting.)

 

Don’t bring the Secret Service,

the NRA,

the black armored vehicles

the rooftop scopes

 

Please wait

Don’t bring the hate for the huddled masses’ yearning or the lies

Don’t bring your birth certificate or

the ghost of your fascist father

 

Please wait

Don’t bring your immigrant wife

don’t bring the daughter who turned her back

looking forward to skiing vacations,

the children abandoned in cages

forsaken

through your inhumanity

 

Please wait

Leave behind your princely son, who does the sword dance with our enemies

 

Please wait

Don’t mumble a prayer with a prompt from Siri

or Google the sacred tradition at the last minute or read from prepared remarks

 

Please wait

we don’t counterpunch at a funeral

or send the migrant ship back

or close our hearts at borders

 

Please wait to capitalize

to dominate a scene of loss

to dishonor the past

 

Please wait

 

10/30/18

 **

 

Poem:

Further Continuing Unfinished Greetings from the Capitols of Peace

 

Message 1:

My capitol and your capitol

Are the capitols of peace

We negotiated through breathing

What is tough is the heart beating

-When will you be returning to the Capitol of Peace?

 

Message 2:

We are just beings with a thought before sleeping

The path of believing

that took us so very far from our capitols of peace! Meet me at the crossing to the Capitol of Peace

 

Message 3:

Let’s go together to the Capitol of Peace!

(The age isn’t golden but it may be within- they say it

doesn’t matter what country you’re in!

We meet at the Capitol of Peace

 

Message 4:

We always live here

In spite of everything

that would tend to interfere

-what we most remember:

The willowpond in summer

Minnows weaving in the watercolorgreen

shimmering, reflecting the many quiet steps to the Capitol of Peace.

 

Remember that day on our way to the Capitol of Peace!

 

Message 5:

In the capitols, jazz in every window

Light flows outward in the course of peace,

Children hold your memories

prayer flags in the breeze

Before the Capitols of Peace.

 

Message 6…

 ***

(8/9/17)

 

Poem after Election:

 

A Conservative Prayer of Thanksgiving. The tune is traditional.

(“American Tune” as played by Paul Simon)

 

Rich Men Have Dominion

 

The Rich Man hath dominion

Hath faith to make it be

All genesis no exodus

From sea to shining sea!

 

Yes the president’s ascension

to the highest office in the land

Must be the will of one on high

For the wealthy raise His hand

 

(chorus):

 

So long, they’ve waited so long

They couldn’t catch a break

The wealthiest individual now

is granted

More than one man can make

More than one man can make

 

We’ll ban the liberal establishment

And all those popular nay-sayers

Conservatives, the Bible says,

Will answer all your prayers

 

For the Rich Men have dominion

The Bible tells us so

We’ll strive to make prosperity

For people we don’t know

 

There was no Great Depression

No Progressive Era’s divide

The wealthiest obsession

Doth finally provide!

 

So let’s do our jobs at WalMart

Lower jobs for lower pay

Low income night security

Give the President a chance they say.

 

Chorus:

So long they’ve waited so long

They couldn’t catch a break

The wealthiest individual now

is granted

More than one man can make

More than one man can make

 

Yes History’s running backwards

The story’s all been changed

The wealthy have the answer

Your future’s rearranged

 

So give Republicans a chance they say

And lend a rousing cheer

With penthouse views over land and sea

-can’t see history from here.

 

(11/16/2016)

 ***

 

 

 

 

Time Runs Backwards

 

 

Time is moving backwards

Don’t know who I am 

The Great Depression never happened

It was part of Nature’s Plan

 

Roosevelt hates the Working Man

The Right Wing was correct 

You’ve got to think of things anew

The history books reject

 

Turn up the News

Throw out the book

Re-educate yourselves, you know

The top One-Percent has got your back

Just like the Fox news shows!

 

There weren’t no Revolution 

The Civil War was just a spat 

The vet’rans died for something

That America has forgot

(Assassinated presidents- so sad but that was that)

 

We’ll ban the liberal establishment 

And all those sad nay-sayers

Conservatives, the Bible says, 

Will answer all your prayers

 

The White House will be a bed  of roses

Without those nasty thorns

It’s going to be a Palace of Gold

A gilt name- plait to adorn.

 

National parks be condo-ized

Our rivers run hot with energy 

We’ll frack the fricking landscape 

Just how God meant things to be.

 

The Rich Man have dominion 

Just let Trump make it be

All genesis no exodus 

From sea to shining sea.

 

Yes the Rich Folks have dominion 

The Bible tells us so

We’ll strive to make prosperity 

For people we don’t know 

 

So let’s do our jobs at WalMart

Lower jobs for lower pay 

Low income night security jobs

Give Trump a chance they say.

 

Yes History’s running backwards

The story’s all been changed

The rich folks have the answer 

Your future’s  rearranged

 

You won’t need no Social Security 

No EPA or green protection 

Your political correctness 

Can recycle the Big Rejection!

 

Now we’ve got an ivory tower

With Melania and Ivanka in it

O beautiful for spacious skies

Is how we’re going to spin it

 

So give Republicans a chance they say

And lend a rousing cheer 

With their penthouse views from  sea to sea 

You can’t see history from here!

 

jk

11/15/2016

 ***

Hey, it’s Sunday.

Here is a gospel number.

“The Red States Revelations”

(or The Book Of Larry)

some newly-translated windblown fragments.

Chapter 1:

And they said, Master, how can we feed the multitudes after your big tax cuts?

And the Master handed him a fish and saith, Have faith. I have a lunch date with my biggest contributors. I’m sure you can work something out.

Chapter 2:

On the way they saw a woman who had no job, and another who was not paid the same as a man doing the same job. Master, they called out, I have no job, and I who am working am not paid the same amount as the man doing the same job.

And the Master saith, See this child over there that can do the same job for a penny. See the one across the sea that will do that of which you complain for the same penny but for ten hours a day: Go, and do likewise.

Chapter 3:

And they went on from that place and found a couple older in age than the others. One of the followers asked in what manner they might live as they await the blessed life to come. And the Master saith: I suggest any of several tax deferred savings accounts. These will be a blessing unto them for the kingdom is like unto a Roth IRA or a personal savings account that belongeth only to you. It doth have your name on it. But lo, Master, some of these elderly have nothing. And the Master saith: Verily to that which have, more will be given, and vice versa. At this they wondered at its wisdom.

From town to town they went wondering, listening and studying the fine print of all that he saith.

Chapter 4: The Book of Larry

And the servant sayeth, Yea, and verily, would I understand this ownership society. And should I not have the tools by which I worketh, and own them, and have access to the company expense account for all my travels far and wide, and should I not share in the ownership of the plant and equipment by which I earn my daily bread, and claim ownership of the many stock options now reserved for those who deprive me even of a roof over my head?

But the Master picked up his scourge, and smiteth him a mighty smite, and drive him from the temple being careful not to disturb any of the money changers who were shaking down the widow for her mite, and curseth him even unto the end of his days.

And then they went out of town and saw a gathering place of veterans and the Master rose up saying saying Verily the benefits for all these shall be cut in the coming fiscal year, to which prophesy the multitude marvelled.

The ones afflicted with demons rose up saying Thou represseth the poor and those in need, dishonor such as these, casting them out? Even unto the daughters and sisters to oppress by new fangled laws? And the Master replied Lo, I think I seeth my house from here!

And the followers laughed at this and went from that place. And the Master saith, the Kingdom is like a gated community…

Chapter 6

And so it came to pass at nightfall the Master yawneth and saith to his followers Excuseth me for I am bushed right now, and he fluffeth his pillow before his followers and saith the Song of the CEO:

O Administration thou art by my side

Though I walk through the shadow of free enterprise thou art with me;

Thou reviseth the tax code

To make it simple

And raiseth the taxes on sales and amenities of mine enemies;

Yea the multitude deserveth nothing

Thou turnest the tables belatedly;

Thou enacteth much needed tort reform

And protecteth me from frivolous lawsuits

Though they be but 1% of 1% of my losses thou restoreth them unto me

Thou smitest the trial lawyers amassed against me

Thou cappest my damages

And freeth me from regulation

When I faileth decisively thou subsidizeth me

Thou grantest me billions to support my cause

Thou endest competition

And grantest me untrammeled advantage over mine enemies

Thou doest the R&D and chargest me nothing!

Thou grantest me dominion

And privatize my soul

Yea though I walk through the shadow of free enterprise

Thou fixeth it for me

My offshore accounts endureth

tax free forever.

And the Master slept

Chapter 7:

And awakening the Master looketh out, and seeing birds in the trees, and squirrels and other wild creatures, he saith: The environment causeth a great racket disturbing my slumbers. Have one of these my people raketh the leaves. And he gave a leaf a smite with his toe.

And they went from there and saw a wedding. These two have much in common, sayeth one. They are like unto the ancient Greeks at the Olympics, of like gender. And the Master saith Verily these faileth the test. To marry one with the other wouldst be like unto turning water into wine. It is like unto a trend in music which disturbeth the neighbors and driveth them crazy, like unto Elvis, afflicting all.

And then the Master saith

Offendeth me not, the poor that lifteth thineself up by thine bootstraps;

Offendeth me not, those following the rule book to the letter;

Offendeth me not, the heavy- laden that doest all the work for me.

Consider the birds in the trees, how humble they are, they stayest out of my way; they provide food for my table, as the earth provideth oil for the recreational vehicles of all

…And so end the precious fragments found in a jar in a wind blown desert long ago, and yet still inspiring Americans today! It is an awakening to which the Blue States watch with wonder.

jk

(11/07/04, – but still the same) from the notebook where all drafts are rough drafts.

 

 

 

 (Note: I admit these really don’t get off the ground, but it’s an idea I may return to later. It’s just an idea for a little volume.)

Here is a page from my notebook about the changing skyline of San Francisco

 

On Steamer Day -a history poem

 

2018:

 

City of cranes

High rise skyline

Sinking in the mud sill

 

Beloved Babylon of Barbary

What has become of you?

 

***

 

1850s:

 

From Telegraph Hill the lookout

a signal flag is raised

over the sand dunes

across the mud flats in this

god-forsaken place of fleas

 

Twice a month the steamer comes

with mail on Steamer Day

 

and up Montgomery from a ramshackle stretch of Market Street

townspeople congregate

knots and eddies crowd about

on Steamer Day

 

Knuckle by an old steam donkey dozer choking smoke

push past lawyers cads and drays

alert incoming manifest

aboard on Steamer Day

 

to Long Wharf booming aloud

with intermittent rumbling

as pile drivers

pound down rafts of redwood

 

out past store ships

Niantic, Apollo

newly planked streets

constant hammering

 

On quiet sea would it be

letters from a loved one

or news of striking gold…

anything to lift the constant fog

through the dark shimmering gate

aboard the steamship hold

 

Only the sadly murdered of Happy Valley

(the foundry tenements buried shallow on

the sandlot Mission Road,

sleep, awaiting Judgement Day)

 

-others await a letter

on Steamer Day

 

The course of life and death

in the steamship’s narrow hold

our fortunes are never fixed

no intelligence foretold

 

-no tower no magic lantern on a building high above :

 

…the garish the gaudy

the precious the vain

The multicolored nonsense in the sky

-No Dancing God of Bullshit on the sixty something floor…

 

just a side- wheel steamer rolling in

circa 1854.

***

 

Part 1 rough notebook draft

jk

5/26/18

 

Sunday: Spring in North Beach a California poem

 

A simple string becomes the sound of the reed and flute on the air of Washington Square all for the joy of

butterfly and bird and bug

 

A Monarch butterfly fluttering trumpeting yellow in his great circling,

up to the leaves and all about

like a folded paper fortune-teller

 

Origami creature of air

folding and unfolding

counting colors of the park

green and blue and yellow in shade

Your fortune now is:

Statue bell and cloud

 

The trumpeter plays his intervals

and the Chinese fiddle blues

and traffic in languages of

North Beach

 

Outside the burned out shell of the old workplace on Union

masonry facade blue

sky of midday shines right through

 

Casual drinkers at Vesuvio

ghost of Bob Kaufman

seminal poet in a poncho and battered hat, outside

I saw you

voice of Gregory Corso

I remember

 

Where Nana Juana Briones grazed her cows in the 1830s the poets look on

Ferlinghetti arms folded in his doorway City Lights

all the Beat poets milling about to fit into the frame

 

Washington Square

3 trees

trumpet blues

river of sky wave after wave of cloud

 

the statue you climbed as a kid

floating

you with your head in the grass

all infinite countless

undefinable things -beautiful -breathing elements

breathing as the trees do

Poet’s words in the leaves of the trees in old North Beach circling

 

Monarch, I ask you

why, the mind, the literal, the figurative,

Kerouac,

tools of practice

-instead of one perception,

one grasp, one actual thing?

 

They dug up the time capsule

at the foot of bronze Ben Franklin

and we’re still alive!-

The wordless capsule spinning out thoughts

as all the poets do

Bob Kaufman, is that butterfly you?

 

jk

6/8/2018

 

Gold

earth poem  (or Some Assembly Required)

 

They figured out the continents during my lifetime

the drift and scuttle

the cement mixer

of ocean floor spreading

 

that’s some nice real estate

where they were shooting the cannons

I can see condos

 

in 1969 during the war

we looked back from the moon

too at the marble destiny green and blue

 

the sight of it stopped all thought

for sixty seconds

to imagine the first day in the garden.

 

this place really could use some work-

I can see condos

there at the edge of the blue.

that’s a money pit there though

where Eden was.

 

***

 

We walk for a short time

consider longevity

-nice sunset last night

 

My wife asked about it from across the room.

Well, it’s gold.

 

6/14/18

 

Ode on an Ice Plant; a stepped-on sonnet

 

…or alien species go home

 

Walk not upon nor weaken the ice plant, she cautioned

Though humble, resplendent, purple imperial

Or the larger, pale yellow strong rooted, ethereal

Encroaching the natives- ice plant takes its portion

 

Established on hillside, the seaside commanding

With green leaves and tubular, the native grasses excluding

With that dazzling psychedelic color deluding-

And thus the ice plant mega-landscape demanding

 

So Californians -not to naturalize-might prefer a more bulldozed reproval:

And heed the quieter plea for invasive species removal.

 

and oh: how my tennis shoes on ice plants go smooshing

I’m not buying the ice plant propaganda those purple plants are pushing.

 

(3/26/18)

for Tina Heringer

 

 

 

Breathing as the Trees Do

A simple string, the chinese fiddle

the sound of the reed and flute on the air of Washington Square

all for the joy of butterfly and bird and bug

A Monarch butterfly fluttering trumpeting yellow in his great circling,

up to the leaves and all about

like a folded paper fortune-teller

Origami creature of air

folding and unfolding

counting colors of the park

green and blue and yellow in shade

Your fortune now is:

Statue bell and cloud

The trumpeter plays his intervals

and the Chinese fiddle blues

and traffic in languages of

North Beach

Outside the burned out shell of the old workplace on Union

masonry facade blue

sky of midday shines right through

Casual drinkers at Vesuvio

ghost of Bob Kaufman

seminal poet in a poncho and battered hat, outside

I saw you

voice of Gregory Corso

I remember

Where Nana Juana Briones grazed her cows in the 1830s the poets look on

Ferlinghetti arms folded in his doorway City Lights

all the Beat poets milling about to fit into the frame

Washington Square

3 trees

trumpet blues

river of sky wave after wave of cloud

the statue you climbed as a kid

floating

you with your head in the grass

all infinite countless

undefinable things -beautiful -breathing elements

breathing as the trees do

Poet’s words in the leaves of the trees in old North Beach circling

Monarch, I ask you

why, the mind, the literal, the figurative,

Kerouac,

tools of practice

-instead of one perception,

one grasp, one actual thing?

They dug up the time capsule

at the foot of bronze Ben Franklin

and we’re still alive!-

The wordless capsule spinning out thoughts

as all the poets and those Buddha winos do

Bob Kaufman, is that butterfly you?

Sunday: Spring in North Beach a California poem

jk

6/8/2018