2007 passes away today, another gravestone year, while 2008 comes forth from the womb of hope, born with the promise of sanity stabilized by the madness of the months passed. I'm not one for holiday poetry, but the muse struck over the weekend, returning after months away, perhaps just a one-time glimpse of a fairy headed under the same six feet as the dying year, perhaps a dancing Robin Hood bringing riches from the new year.

------------------------------

---------------------------------

Muse you come like the devil,
like a larcenous lady of the evening,
secretly seductive in your simple return,
luring me in with that bedroom finger,
"come hither", you call,
but I've laid with you before and you left me diseased,
I cured myself and found freedom, only to
meet your death-promise gaze around an unmarked corner,
the next aisle of books unwritten,
you'll fake your promises again, I know,
and this time I'm not going to believe,
the eyes of poets tell lies like lightning,
the striking bolts burn off the trampled grass,
the seeds ripe for harvest,
soon I'll eat ten or a thousand or a million,
but there's no nutrition in a paltry diet of words.
Oh muse, please just pass on to the next
generation's voice and leave me be, a job,
a family, a city, and a mission,
let me live the life I'm born for,
let me create my own little kingdoms
and sit for life on brittle thrones
with vision too blurred to see
the begging masses dying to find
a cause to die for,
let me turn my ears deaf to the
cries of a forlorn generation on the
brink of eternal oblivion,
don't curse me with your divine calling,
don't make me sick with words again.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shake off the shackles of the delirious doledrums walk,
the day by day dissolution of the soul,
consciousness disintegrates in the acid bath
of the capitalist conspiracy, slowly
snaking its way 'round your ankles,
smack that serpent's head before it sucks
you down into the deep green swamp,
cheap thrills exchanged for daytime chain
gangs of the institutional minds,
they'll straighten out those crooked thoughts,
box in your octopus mind,
the straight line toed to the false
leprechaun jackpots, eyes leading the
stray whims back to the digital darkness,
the bitter stains on a bruised and rotting
soul, you sell yourself cheap, and once
you've taken the glittering bait, the
hook digs deep into the roof of your mouth and
pulls the humanity thread out of your
skull, through your nose, a bloody
string of spent inspirations and drowned
desires fished out for a few worthless
dollars, so recognize the hook's point now,
stay still long enough for the line to
go slack, and wiggle that fish head
out of the barb's grasp ever so
gently, don't become the fisherman's
dinner when you all you really want is
a quiet rock and a clean, warm lake.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The lattice threads of a poorly-woven year
pass through alcohol-filter fingers on
the year's last weekend, let the
shattered pieces fall away,
hands left cut and bloodied as the forgotten
knives stab one more time, dig the gold
dust droppings of treasured days out
of the stinging scar-forming gashes,
pass through the fiery gates of another
tortured calendar and stay clear of
hidden land mines ahead, the lie detector's
on the high setting, don't let its incessant
beeping and buzzing drown out the
siren's lullaby, beckoning a dream-wise
turn to the coast of the new year,
she keeps the lighthouse ablaze through the
epochal storms that drown the
casual beachcomber and capsize the
luxury dreamliners poisoned by the nightmare
disease, but the seasoned mariner
holds the oars close while the waters
pass over, holds his breath until
the whispered lullaby become a piercing
rock and roll shriek,
she's calling you into the new year,
she's calling you forward to the
abandoned hopeful shores, she's leading you
to the holiday dreams of a
sin-soaked city,
heed the siren's pop song call.

--------------------------------------------------

Lawrence Ferlinghetti gave an excellent interview to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now next week. Something good tro watch while you nurse the New Year's hangover. http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2007/12/24


Happy New Year! May unexpected goodness and random miracles dot the road of chance occurrences that will be your fate in 2008.

Holy Water From An Autumn Rainstorm

Welcome to fall, which comes quickly and grips Portland like a gray vise. Fall can never come too soon, as things left in the summer sun too long begin to dry up and blow away. The city comes to life, breathing the heavy fog of Willamette autumns.
--------------------------------


Fall dawns on the city some September afternoon,
coffee and cigarettes, dark bars and rock,
the taste of woodsmoke on Southeast evening bike rides,
the city's rivers carry you to the ocean if you
don't plant yourself deep in the banks,
sometimes the constant Cascades-to-the-sea flow
hypnotizes the bank dwellers until the world
turns upside down and shakes out its pockets on you,
hold your breath and it'll all pass by, flowing
over with fallen logs and mermaid ghosts,
at the first flash of fresh air through the algae,
you've got to grip the muddy earth and stand up strong,
the city keeps changing while you hide your eyes
from the loose dirt and blood the waters shake
off, catch your breath when you rise,
stand too fast and the blood rush blackens
everything and you sink deeper underneath
the river's incessant abacus flow of days,
get back up and take a slow stroll down to
where the bartender forgot your name, but
remembers your drink, the waitress still
smiles because she's never seen the bad days
you bring when you're still underwater,
those bodies that haunt you, the boats
you missed because you couldn't lift
your hand, they're all just ghosts,
the dreams you faked yourself into fade back
into butt-filled ashtrays and dying candles,
drink up and jump back in, you're
not the first one poisoned,
throw it all up and start clean, another
fall comes on.
-----------------------------------

We spent the last week of September in San Francisco and the North Bay area. I found some words in places I'd seen before.
---------------------------------
Dogtown limit sign hanging from a tree leaning over California One,
keep your eyes open or you'll miss the
hidden Bolinas turnoff, meander around the lagoon
with the pelicans and sandpipers, avocets and curlews,
sea gulls and fiddler crabs, egrets and herons,
canyon ranches where fifth-grade memories sleep silently,
waiting for time's inevitable return, three more coyote
stories, still wishing to be a mole in the ground,
still following the drinking gourd,
even that slow broken ocean slide highway
crosses back into the gray noise death civilization
of too many people thirsting for dollars
the easy measured failure of lives
steered aside from the endless pursuit
of beauty, the magnificence of the
eucalyptus aroma, the perfume of tea-scented bushes,
salvation promised in multilingual bird songs
and granola women celebrating the decay smell
of regenerating rotten fruit and debris,
the lagoon fills over centuries, becomes a
meadow, later a peat-bog graveyard,
childhood hopes, still praying on night hike
pitch black coast grassland hills, above quail canyons,
and still rolls to the Golden Gate,
that heaven-departed Highway One.
----------------------------------------------------

In San Francisco, I was once again pursued by the ghost of Gregory Corso, and it's possible I'll soon follow this message with an all-Corso issue. Perhaps I might write a biography of America's most purely romantic poet and poet soul. In the meantime, I wrote an elegy to Jack Micheline, who I knew little of before he visited me in a dream on this trip.
-----------------------------------------------------
Jack Micheline met the angels on a BART train to
Orinda, 1998, hypnotized by the white-white-white-yellow
lights of the eternal East Bay Hills tunnel,
the clickety-clack roll rhymed with the countdown
chant of Cassady along the cold Mexican rails,
numbers and foghorns lull me to the same
constellation consciousness, neither a star-bound
supernova nor a death-bound rail rider,
still staggering to the dream train lounge car,
perhaps Jack holds forth there, purgatorio soul
sentenced to roam the rails though his
only earth-bound crime was unrequited
love to the soul-sick East Coast city that
left him hopeless, crawling back to the
San Francisco lover always waiting,
ready to sing him another love song,
Jack I know your spirit before I know
your words, you lazed into my mid-vacation
dreams and asked for a smoke and a
few words to a lazy hopeful dreamer,
Jack you sing of truth and beauty and
the euphoria joy of hot chicken soup
and women who understand every word,
another beer to you, Jack, and I'll look
for you next time the door close beep
whisks me off 79 MPH on East Bay
elevated rails, the clickety-clack calls
you back home to the Bay City that
loved you for Jack Micheline.
-------------------------------------------------------------

Janet, the bartender at Vesuvio, once again took care of me in mid-afternoon, prescribing the perfect tonic for my ailing soul, this gin called 209, brewed from an old recipe at Pier 50 in San Francisco.
-------------------------------------------------------------

I opted for a career change at Cafe Vesuvio,
counselor Janet heard the miseries of a failed whiskey man,
the brown choice hooch of washed-up miners
and failed night barons whose kingdoms shrank
to sheltered doorways in left coast city nights,
"I need to lift my spirits", I told her and
she took charge, none of the motorcycle-thrust
theatrics of all-action no-knowing Portland
college degree baristas, so bored with the USA,
straight 209 poured the bartender doctor
with a smile that said welcome to the new office,
gin drunk ready to start bursting juniper
berries in red careless faces,
welcome to the well drink of hope,
the new job don't pay any better but
when you sleep at night, despair visions of
whisky delirium give way to dreams
of cricket and derailed Undergrounds,
scrawny high desert bushes cheer "welcome home!"
you don't need to be another drunk miner
or a failed post-jail on the road driver
dying against the bottle depths,
Welcome to the gin world! where it's
all bubbles and bounces and
"how the hell you all doin'?!?"
Dr. Janet rescues another destitute patient.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

I submitted that poem for a little display here in Portland, but alas it vanished into some sort of ether and never appeared where it was destined.
----------------------------------------------------------------

True prophets endure the ignorant wrath of false apostles,
actors proud to proclaim microscopic truths
to pond-bound ducks quacking to find mother's line,
the messengers of TRUTH and BEAUTY absorb the
incessant wasp's sting with pure Buddha joy,
the gentle whispers of eternity comfort
the crucified,
the airline roar of machine-made nothing-noise
deafens the city dwellers to the sky-bound
messages of salvation and celebration,
the whispered peaceful chant gathers weight under the
incessant howl of the soul-killing industry,
waiting patiently for the lights to finally go black
and the factory gears to bind and lock shut,
the words of beauty keep on humming, gentle
murmurs like a sonic BOOM!
cutting through the eternal silences,
the prophet weathers all storms.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, the pipes of prophecy are opening once again for the fall deluge. Make sure your gutters are clean and your drains unclogged- there's a storm coming in.

I'm taking some time off of the increasingly self-contained open mic scene of Portland, waiting for new blood and visionary ideas to take root in a city where too many talented people spend too much time gazing at their own reflections in the bottom of cheap booze glasses and not enough time singing truth and beauty to masses who've never needed those words as badly as they do today. Since Plato, politicians and philosophers have held poets at arm's length, terrified of the power of words wielded like weapons of enlightenment. I invite all the poets and would-be poets of Portland and the world to step up and validate the fears of the establishment, the soul killers that control our communications, our relationships, even our emotions through the enforced captivity of the wage-slave prisons we sell ourselves to for cheap, quick highs. No weapon carries the changing power of well-aimed words.

Enjoy your autumn. You've earned it. Summer chaos subsides into autumn's blanket.

I am, Mikey Golightly.

There's some dirt that no river can ever wash clean

I went to the river this week. The land always loves you and doesn't care how much life you've wasted to get there. The river always pours forth. The Head of the Metolius River is a sacred place and I drank the holy waters.
------------------------------

------
The Metolius River runs full from a shaded forest spring,
all the water it'll need bubbling over from the
Cascades, from Black Butte,
it pushed me awake this morning,
like the onslaught of unexpected love,
the clean water promises eternity, but there's
nothing to add after that headwater spring,
my feet turned warm by the frostbite shock
of cold water on a hot summer evening,
a giant buck grazing just beyond the spring,
the angry water knifes a deep gorge, bleeds
into the Deschutes, the Columbia, the Pacific,
evaporates into ocean storms and rains again
on the stormbreaker mountains, seeps into unknown
subterranean caves, caverns that keep secrets
from before the beginning of time,
God sows his words into droplets beyond
the waxing clouds, and as I listen to
the Metolius pour out from its icy cradle,
I hear his messages in the Cascade air,
making love to the treetop breezes
that never make it to the afterglow,
and I wait for my directions,
come on in, He calls, float along
and see every fish, deer, tree, every rock
along the way, I won't be able
to swim upstream against this fatal river
once I lay myself into its ocean-going promise.

I drank the cold water of the Metolius spring,
the cleanest drink I've ever taken,
and threw water over my head like baptism,
though it won't save me from the waterfalls ahead,
Mount Jefferson watched as she did fifteen years ago,
a young man who walked this same trail,
too afraid then to cross the fence to the river,
a Steller's Jay flew overhead and broadcast
my rebirth to the forest,
chipmunks gathered around, coming closer to
this lonely giant who dared to drink from
the gossiping spring, who slurped the
waters from his hand and tried to taste
the visions in the droplets,
but I only felt the ice in my throat,
nothing crossed my tongue but purity,
Jefferson gathered a few young clouds to
her compass-arrow peak, perhaps to send me
news in the evening's thunder,
maybe to protect herself from
what I might become as the Metolius water
becomes me.
------------------------------------------------

Watch too much of this and you'll go blind,
everyone else's rejection fantasy played out
24 hours day and night in a city where the
streets aren't good enough for you or your
new-found best friend who says he's not
on drugs, anymore, but just one more hit,
little bit of nostalgia, take me back to
Waterfront Park early 90's where the dead end
wasn't vacant yet, plenty of other careless
freaks ready to push you into the river
but too lazy to help you back out,
it's easy to run away when home
is just a collect call back, but there's
no running when there's no starting line,
circle back on a life you never built
in the first place and the dreams aren't
enough to replace the errors of reality,
at least last night I saw a shirtless
girl in my dreams, but she wasn't ready
and neither am I, don't think I'll ever
get in line for a ticket, either, not
while I'm looking down at all the
other losers looking down on me.

------------------------------------------------------

You just showed up in Livingston, just like the
ranch hands, the cross-country tourists, the
would-be cowboys from all western corners,
bikers and rough country music, "let's
hear it for drinkin!" calls out the
band, best to start here, it's opening
night, no regulars and no one knows
how to pretend, not this early in the
night when we've all just showered up,
hit the town, first draft in hand and a
shot waiting, there's a bit of everything here,
even the working girls on Main Street.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

It's all too much on a summer day in Portland,
like cheating God and jumping right back into
the Garden of Eden, no wonder there's no
signs of Portland amid Paris boulevards and
Amsterdam canals and German rulebooks
shared like the spirit-killer Goethe,
no Portland there because here is El Dorado,
our currency not gold but organic green,
our waters not cough medicine but
beer, safest to drink in large quantities,
our women out fixing bikes and making coffee,
while our men labor to polish our
rough insanities into the heirloom
jewels of a mad city protected by
a solid wall of American ignorance
on all sides, who needs defense when
you've got nothing that they'd ever want,
here we've found the true salvation,
the religion of life springs high in
fountains of clothes-ripping abandon,
and we keep the secrets of the
Willamette safe, encoded in poetry
that their credit-shackled computers will
never learn to comprehend.

------------------------------------------


You poisoned this well months ago but now the
misery and lust is all washed out and it's
fresh water served in draft pint glasses all over again,
your same eyes in the same mirror and the
same random faces walk back and forth and
it's nothing like before, nothing like the
desperate winter boy panting for love while
The Cure droned, on and on, now you're
back to yourself here, there's no vacations
from the inside of this mind and your
English is stifled by thin layers of
Italian and godawful German and French
and Dutch, you hope the only flowers that
break through the walk-hardened ground are the
blooms of mad truth and desperate beauty
of city streets where every man and
every woman dance naked because
there's no shared idea of what's going on,
not here in post-Elliott Smith Portland
where hundred year old piss corner walls come
down under daily wrecking balls,
reborn in post-modern glass and steel not
there for the man, but for
the self-appointed kings, like me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last Monday I read at Tony's and several of you came by in support. Thank you so much. The less confident I am, the louder I read, and I understand that the bartender was selling earplugs while I split eardrums with noise obfuscating the words. Now that I know someone's listening, maybe I can tone it down. Last Tuesday I did my best to cause a scene at the Blue Monk but the proper students pretend they're in class and all I did was get my name on the board and a check, maybe a referral to the AP's office. The popular kids don't say 'cock' and 'cunt' on stage except when they refer to their own organs, even on sex night. I learned far more at detention than I ever learned in a classroom.

Last Wednesday I drove 400 miles and found nothing except a flash of my own death in a head-on wreck on US 97 north of Redmond, once a beautiful town but now USA City Inc with Wal-Marts north and south. I'm not praying for your troops when you're fight is against me. I'm praying that a summer wildfire will wipe this state clean of the rape of McMansions and million dollar churches and big-box stores that breed ignorance like sewer rivers breed cholera. I saw flames licking the grass north of Madras and prayed for the troops of wind. Burn down the outskirts and save the heart- there's a faint pulse there but central Oregon is barely breathing anymore.

Last Thursday I went to a baseball game and tried to forget the monsters. Hard to forget the last few days when I'm still working on forgetting my first 34 years.

Last Friday I fired a Colt 45 with a friend, over and over again, and blew away the silhouette target of these manic summer days.

I added a number of random people to the list this time, addresses gathered from various emails and such, and as you didn't give me permission to shoot these clips at your head I'll be happy to remove you at a moment's notice. Ignore the automated "fuck you" response if you ask for someone to open the door and push you out of this rapid bus to the next dimension.

I attached two photos from the Metolius so you can taste the water yourself.

I'm ready to join the team, even if I'm still the last pick in the second grade red rover game. My team might never win, but we always have fun at the post-game parties.

-Mikey Golightly

A tribute to Paul DeLay and the Blues fest


Everyone loves a fat man, sitting on stage
with his leg out almost waiting for some
never-seen grandson to pop up up and ask
the faraway bluesman for a story, he blew those
tales through the harmonica's wail,
hot summer Portland days where the
daytrippers to the blues don't fall into
the prison cells and cocaine habits
squealed across riverside masses while Hood
sleeps off its winter blanket and
kids frolic in the Salmon Street fountains,
and there's blind hurt in the air, all
those dead years where a convict learns
every day-count gash in the cell walls,
every nasty trick we play on each other,
the dirtiest saved for last when
that dandy Devil didn't pick him up
hitchhiking home from Sheridan on the
long coast road, but collected that
soul full of bad debts suddenly in some
death-crazed hospital worse than a jail,
because you're all alone when
the nurse closes the curtain
and no one hears the blues over
the medical technology beeps and clicks
of life machines that can't support
a soul poisoned in America's grown-up
con of cops and crime and walked-out doors,
those lungs don't blow granddad stories
of betrayal and cheating and snitch friends
and women, they all kill you when you
give in and toss them the keys,
and one more time the kids splash in the fountains,
just a few years until they'll fall
in that dirty sewage-slicked river, too.

El Dorado is now open for full section claims- and I am your guide!

(This is an extra-long edition. You might need some time to digest it, perhaps when you'd be watching yet another summer rerun of 'Lost' or 'Star Trek' or whatever passes for novocaine TV these days. Take the time, it'll be worth it.)

So when I first conceived of this email, maybe in a John Day motel room or maybe in a Paris bar, I thought I'd be leading you around the world with me, but the world's not such a big place and there's hardly room for more than me on these trips, and I've not seen all that much, really. Now, home for two weeks and these blackberry roots grow quick and deep in this city, this Portland, I look around here and realize I've been here a long, long time, and I'm probably not moving anywhere. At least not today.

Portland's Broken Word open mic, which may well be the most talented single gathering of poets held on this continent since prehistoric times, has moved from the NoPo war zone to God's own Garden of Eden, Southeast Portland, where, starting this Tuesday at 7:30 PM and continuing every Tuesday night going forward (forever and ever and ever), the voices of the city will converge on the Blue Monk bar/ jazz club at SE 34th and Belmont. Do come. If there is literary history being made in this city, you'll see it there. You might even see me.

Two months on the road and you didn't even get a postcard. All you get is this.

--------------------
I-5 really is no more than a north-south
speed burn out of nowhere,
a necklace of pearled motor courts, the kind
that went out of fashion in the 70's,
I slept in a cheap motel last night and
today I feel like a white trash refugee,
running from nothing though I'm really
not running at all,
here crowded against the Pacific on some
awful peninsula facing an abandoned prison,
no more poetry in this San Francisco than
in Mount Shasta City or Dunnigan or
Oakridge where the only lasting memory
is a woman and her out-of-control son
just seeing what he could get away with,
A&W drive-in where the waitress still comes
to your car, no roller skates or go-go boots though,
Is this the Soviet Union or the USA?
It took me 30 hours from home to get
the first words down in this notebook
smuggled from Pendleton, Oregon cowboys
meet San Francisco women with brand name badges
on their boots and just say "yes'm",
I don't have a home here anymore, I
don't recognize a Bay Area where every town
but my hometown is bounded by the
Wal-Mart- Hayward's too backward
even for that, 1980's gang wars all
over again, Portland had better
be my home, because it's
the only one left.
------------------------------

-----------------------------

You've been here before, maybe not the Miner's Cafe
in Sierra spring Sonora,
but the formica countertops, the swiveling chairs,
old wooden walls and AM country music,
you've been here before,
where you don't order the chicken fried steak
because it's probably frozen,
but nobody sells a prepped and frozen
Denver Omelette,
even if they keep white toast under heat lamps,
Farmer Brothers coffee tastes like home, not
Stumptown Coffee Portland, but the home
of us highwaymen, every truck stop oasis
on the interstate would throw its new
Pilot-TA-Petro truck stop, with its
canned heat lamp fast food and discount CB radios
(and 'wifi' in these never disconnected times),
under a smoked brake rig gargling rocks
down the runaway truck ramps backside Siskiyous,
for one old breakfast place where
everyone's a regular even
when they're just passing through.
------------------------------------------------------------------

The soundtrack of my life entered the public domain last month when the Jesus and Mary Chain reformed for a show at Coachella. And then they did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f_N36SfHL0
I will rent a party suite in Cleveland when they are inevitably inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and will incite the riot such an occasion will demand.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I was born and it was bliss, I died and
came back like Jesus in the desert,
old man Scotland and the runaway in California
no bridge left between two men far too
close for far too long
no man should ever know another too well,
always keep a piece for yourself
the faceless hordes of Southern Californians
slaves to cars and traffic and chain stores,
and Jesus sang in their midst last night,
maybe saved a few, maybe washed away
the smog stink chokehold that
baptizes soulless children the instant
they're conceived in this hell,
I came to the desert a lost believer
always looking for the next direction,
now I'm born again and the red shark
points its convertible nose north, I can't get away
fast enough, and I kidnap these
noisy rock and roll incantations to
another state, another life,
the desert stays the same, the
heat slows everything except the
influx of Los Angeles assholes,
but I leave them behind to rot
in the foul smell of one another,
and I may not almost be gold,
but I'm certainly happy when it rains.
-----------------------------------------
Blank pages, ink, an airplane wobbling a bit through
turbulent North American skies and there's not much
to say in an aluminum can world,
flight magazines suggest some sort of community
with thousands of other fliers thousands of
feet above a world that hardly notes our absence,
same men running sheep in Great Basin desert lands
and in Pyrenees mountain valleys,
same men gambling their last paychecks in
Nevada border casinos and Cambodian
corner dice games,
same women lost in midlife in Oregon valley homes
and in European metropolitan flats,
for a few eternal hours the traveling classes,
families, businessmen, tourists, vagabonds,
suspended above these mundane cycles,
not immune from the days, just encapsulated
in this metal cylinders one careless spark
away from newscast dictated oblivion.
----------------------------------------------
(this poem dedicated to Paris' own Voltaire and to Portland's own Mattress)

When I find that city, golden valleys with
sands of gold and fountains of youth,
when I climb to that city, every woman stuck
on nineteen and every man lost in the psychosis
we're all born with and sentenced to,
when I find that city, mountain air and messages
thousands of years gone by every one in
the language best suited, every one a clear
reflection of the human that discovered
the perfect raptured revelation words,
when I find that city, will I let myself stay
in freelove utopian paradise close the Garden gates,
or will I care only to cry the news out from hometown
Portland streetcorners, my people back home
who can't begin to comprehend half a state, much
less half the world, come home to
sing inscrutable songs of wherever
El Dorado might be, it's not El Dorado
county California once the never-
attained promised land of my
station wagon childhood but El
Dorado the mystic wherever I can
let myself believe I've found that city
will I find it, El Dorado?
-----------------------------------------------------------

Dante, did Corso come to Ravenna and piss
on your grave or maybe shoot some horse
sitting here leaning against the same brick
wall where I just smoked some Maastricht
weed, doing my best Dutch trader impersonation,
thinking that I'm only here because
I'm not too certain where Petrarch's buried,
at least you had excellent taste in
cities of exile, I'd live here if not
Bellinzona, I like that Swiss independence,
the best of all worlds and enough order
to bounce around, travel is never the
tale of counterculture and you, Signor
Dante, as mainstream as any, now all
the Catholics fight over your wet dust remains,
and only you know whether God punched
your ticket or the saint left you
alone at the gate.
------------------------------------------------------------

The road novel is always written at home, the
road's too busy chewing up your time finding
food, a bed, some space to breathe,
you start to wonder if you'll ever find
a place to write again, wonder if you'll
ever strike that jeweled vein of poetry
again, the gold rushes come by surprise
the Comstock went away just as everyone
arrived and here in Holland the only gold
is land hard-won against the water of
the northern seas, everything grows so easy
on the polder meadows that there's not
enough misery to spark songs, not
enough struggle to crack the human
riddle, here the biggest risk is
eternal boredom and the impossible
marijuana overdose.

-------------------------------------------------------------

These back-alley bars, smoke-filled and dirty, students
left and right and French means nothing to me
but liquor helps me pretend to understand and
even to be a bit more American where
it's still not a sin but a bit of an
embarassment to be from the land of wasted
opportunites, Statue of Liberty like a goldrush
and now the spent grandchildren of the dream
miners don't know whether to look back or
ahead but the crushing tailings of those
failed fantasy vein diggings bury us, choke us
in the toxic waters left after the quick fix
wore off, nothing left there, not that
the Europeans can find, but the last wave
of Chinese immigrants made good money on
the dropped pennies of American hopes
while the piss-drunk leftover workers
failed and died, choked on five-dollar
eggs and forgotten songs, dust bowl
towns and boarded-up railroad hotels
and now there's no map ahead and
I can't bring myself to ask
the guide where it is I got lost.
--------------------------------------------------------------
No new stories to tell, Europe's history is
on display as a parade of wealth, royalty,
let's all bow down to the thirty-third
vial of Christ's blood, I may not amount
to much in this life but I can bury
a little jar of Kool-Aid and maybe label
it 'blood of the martyr' and watch my
descendants make just enough money from the
tourist parade to keep themselves permanently
fucked up, did I just fly halfway around
the world to trap myself in sardine tin
Europe for a month, I can get high
just as easily at home where it's only
slightly less legal but watch the
weather forecasts, there's a heavy
covering of fear clouds ahead of a
violent summer, I don't know what news
I've gathered in California deserts and
European cafes this spring but I still
don't have a map and this journey's
getting to be a bit long, I wonder
if I'll be awake at the next station,
over there I might be a leader or
just a thorn and here I'm not
even worthy of a grave at Pere
Lachaise, certainly not the Pantheon.

Worn down to a whining stub of a man,
nothing but complaints and miseries and
I'm trapped here in my head and bombarded
by shit-pop versions of Gordon Lightfoot in
a canalside coffeeshop in Utrecht where that
Catholic stink has mostly dissolved in
the algae green canals, I've let whatever
muse I had slip away and the cracks
between words that don't fit together are
deep enough to lose every bit of
sanity I might still have, I've
always been obsessed with safety
and I never let go of the rope,
especially when I'm halfway to the
bottomlands where even the fish
have headlights, maybe I should just drop in
and figure that we've all got a
floating instinct when we need it,
but you know that's nothing more than
a lie when musicians can walk into
rivers and drown, and while it might
be nice to be able to call shit
by both its look and smell, the
true secret gift is being able to
make your own gold, not bitch about
how much better Midas' life might be.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last time I heard 'The Passenger' I was back in
Amiens, France, watching some Frence 40-something
indie punk named Laurent Margarin struggling to
wrap his fluid French lips around our brutally
exact American, got a word for every emotion
so we don't need to act them out anymore,
poetry's not a guessing game in a language
with a million words, Laurent hitched a ride
on the back of my neon mushroom elephants
and landed here alongside me at Stumptown
Portland, this place becomes a rough flower
in the million people paving the streets of
the Rose Festival, and you know I could
never catch a real buzz in Europe with
3.5% beer that's more of a water substitute
than an intoxicant and greenhouse-grown weed
that you've gotta mix with tobacco to
feel, I had a good time but it's not Portland,
Laurent and his compatriots can lay around
every green day in their park-cafe city center
and drink cheap delicious wine but they're
still under that long Catholic shadow, they
beheaded a king but still haven't neutered
the loudest dog of a 2000 year epoch,
no one will remember Laurent Margarin
yet the Popes' names are eched in
rotten marble and blood.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And these straight line selfish dialogues are nothing more
than dust and faded lives, fifty years on, the
words sleep in the same clouds as Elliott Smith
drifts among now, lost behind the straight line
thrust, pen on paper, speed up to get to
the noon bell and then let it slide across
the page, can't complain about your health because
you've never felt so good, sometimes you've
gotta build a fence around yourself so
you can play without limits, then the
D'Achouffe gnome looks out at you, same
as the one in the Heineken bar in Amsterdam
where you led the mushroomed masses to
drink off evening events that you'll never
need to understand, the gnome chuckled then
and it laughs now, you saw Elliott
Smith window displays in Utrecht and now
his songs drift past cemetery gates in Portland
and it's like you never left, hard to tell
exactly which walls these words are bound to,
there's as little of the Netherlands here as
there is of Portland there, here you're the
producer, over there you're the collector, you
brought home a sack full of relics
a head about to explode and no skills
to build words that don't fall down
around shifting piers barely supporting
these imaginary canal houses.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Well, that's my sldeshow! Hope to see you some Tuesday at the Broken Word, or maybe at the Say When casino, McDermitt, Nevada, or maybe riding neon red and green elephants in central Asia.

-Mikey Golightly

From A Modest Portland Library #1

Hello all, and apologies for the winter, where poetry developed here in Portland but didn't spread via email, leaving you all to fend for yourselves in the sea of media garbage. Consider this a lifeline- grab at your own risk. I write to you from my work-in-progress library, music, posters, books and all. My place.

Last night I read at the Broken Word open mic at Portland's Alberta Street Pub, as Mikey Golightly, my poetic alter-ego. I shared the stage with many underground luminaries and can only hope I held my own. Patrick Brocade, a man who I know as both an employee at the old Django's and as the winner (judged by me) of the first poetry slam I ever went to, back in '99, read a delicious ballad of lovers more into each other's white powder stash than each other, and as always, captivated the audience. Buddy Bee Anthony, the white Stew of Portland, sang a capella an incredible song about a small town lover captivated by the city lights. Curtis Whitecarrol, Doug Spangle... the list goes on and on. For the first time since the days of the Rain City Review, I've come to believe that Portland is not a poetic desert. There were more listeners than poets- maybe 60 people in all, standing room only, including 20 reading poets. I'll be returning next week at 7:30 PM Tuesday.

I'm not one for trumpeting my own works by any stretch, but I was taken aback by the response to my reading last night. In some ways, it's discouraging, as I've always felt I'm at my best when I'm writing for no one but myself and the anonymity of an occasional email. Once you taste appreciation, I think you become addicted, and transform from poet to politician.

I'll let you be the judge. Here are the poems from last night's reading, in order, and with approximated inter-poem banter.
-------------------
(this poem is a metaphor)

This bag's just a bunch of stems and seeds,
the grower never learned how to keep
the whole cola together,
he'd gotten all into it at first, all the
perfect organic nutrients, the high-wattage
bulbs, pH testing the soil every day,
watered each one by hand
but fifty days is an awful long time,
so he got bored, got tired of it,
forgot why he'd started this
dangerous thing in the first place,
so just as the flowers were showing,
he let it go,
and when he went back to it,
there wasn't a whole lot left,
but he hung it up anyway,
dried it,
sold a few bags to get it
all started again,
and no one's sure if he knows that
it's pretty subpar stuff,
but it's all there is,
so either enjoy it now or
wait until the next crop comes in,
though who knows if he'll grow another?
------------------------------

-----------------
Over the weekend, the native peoples of central Oregon and the Columbia Basin observed the 50th anniversary of the destruction of sacred Celilo Falls. Celilo is central to the Oregon story, and I truly believe this land will never achieve its potential until the falls flow once again. This is my story of Celilo.
-----------------------------------------------

Sing through me, muse, about those late days
in the ruined Eden of Portland,
sing to me of the last dark hours
when the final sentinels of peace and imagination
fell apart on the banks of the Willamette,
when guilt and dread and fears of
final rejection kept the warriors away
from the last great battles of imagination.
Sing of the trees, their thousand years
message of stability, their eternities holding
our hills together, their branches protecting
the birds that carried our messages to
and from the rest of the world,
sing of the trees as they burned, as
their families lay dead and drowning
in polluted millponds on our
poisoned river.
Sing of the Mighty Columbia, gateway
to the ocean, giver of food and life,
the violent river that ruled the
Northwest,
sing to me as she drowned, as
her falls and waves fell finally
silent behind their dam,
sing to me of the way she was
raped for her energy,
and sing to me of the day
she broke through, the day Celilo
came back from its watery grave.

-----------------------------------------------
At this point in the reading, I unbuttoned my nice poetry reading shirt to reveal my old tie-dyed Coffee People shirt with Jim and Patty on the front, and made some comments about the old Portland, and about how it was good to see faces who've been here for years. I then launched into a few Portland poems.
-----------------------------------------------
Skid row junkies don't even get high anymore,
don't even look for another fix,
united only in their cowardice, afraid to end
it all with one overloaded blast
of whatever it is that got them there in
the first place.
They've spent all the excitement, fed their
minds to bursting with crazy utopian fantasies
and the narcotic spell of stopped time and fuck-all,
and now it's just day after day of the
same sidewalks, the same shit smells,
the same rat hair, and
it just doesn't fucking matter anymore, does it?
It's the same gutter trap in Portland, Manchester,
Sheffield, Berlin, the final ash piles of
burned out lives and sick exhaustion
of the same dry fantasies,
dreams that they've all learned aren't
that good anyway, aren't what you'd
want to live in,
with shithead idiots following, looking for
a bit crumb of the genius
that they wouldn't know
how to handle
anyhow.
-----------------------------------
I could stare at that bike tattoo on the back
of your neck forever, just a simple black
ink drawing, like a sign,
is the bike route the path to your mind?

(email mikey.golightly, at gmail.com, to get the rest of "The Bike Tattoo"...)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
(note- the woman who read after me showed the crowd her bike tattoo. It was, however, on her ankle.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Where is Portland's poetry, shuffling empty words between
its bike messengers, its strippers, its baristas, its barflies,its
would-be poets huddled in dark booths, in smoky bars,
its waiters and waitresses, its students, lovers, its
homeless, its unemployed, its booksellers, its
public servants, its bus drivers?
Or is it buried in the walls of hundred year old,
buildings, under the tracks of Depression-era streetcars,
in the Willamette polluted with all the wastes
of this land's rapists, underneath the trees
especially the Lewis and Clark Centennial monkey tail
trees, one in every old neighborhood?
Or maybe there's really nothing here but more
dying people treading the same grave-bound
spirit trails that this city has walked
since the coin-flip days on
a forested riverbank,
all that's here is what we imagine should
be, but it's not San Francisco, it's not
Paris,
and these words will turn to mud here, like the
old trees this is written in.
---------------------------------------------------


I'll read again at the Broken Word, next week, provided I get there by 7 to get on the sign-in sheet, and if I do read, I'll bring out a poem I recently wrote about JFK, maybe even some haiku.

One last note- I've begun a new project, my own translation of Petrarch's Rime Sparse. Just something to keep them poetic gears lubricated. Many years ago, Michael Wyatt inspired me to learn more about translation, the process, its significance to cultural development, and so forth. Over 13 years later, I still chew on some of the things we talked about in a long drive from Medford back to Stanford.

Beware the Ides of March,
MVK

The Narcisstic Flaneur- Special Current Events Edition

Sorry to interrupt you all from your day to day, but there's a crime going on in this country right now- the media is calliing for herding all the lovers and the mentally unstable of the world and putting them in concentration camps and keeping them far from the Spartan machinery of the American state. We don't have time for 950-mile late night drives to follow our hearts.

I've been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Anyway...
------------------------------

The media obsessed with a
love-crazed astronaut, wait, I'm
sorry, the talking point is "wigged out"
we've gotta keep those
lovesick crazies away
from our spaceships and our kids,
how do we filter them
out, throw them away?
No time for the insanity of
the heart when you've got
a whole society to kill,
let's love the lazy ones
the ones who play sheep
in the face of a shepherd
sending them to graze in
death camas, yeah, that's
something to celebrate!
and let's imprison the
lovers, shame them into
their closets,
you, too, there was once
someone you'd drive forever for,
you see a mirror on the front page,
it's that passion that
makes them brilliant,
it's the channeling.
the poor woman couldn't
keep the walls up
between too many
lives anymore- it's the
hardest type of work,
takes too much study, really.
She should have kept
planting those African violets.