"You are the camera, the poet is merely a lens"
Thank you, Hilary Clinton, for re-introducing the word "poetry" to the American vocabulary, recycling Mario Cuomo by asserting that Obama "campaigns in poetry and governs in prose". Sounds like my kind of candidate.
Can 2008 be 1968 done right? Can we re-enact the Prague Spring here and call it the Portland Spring and begin the movement that releases Oregon from the federal chains that bind?
Enough politicking. I traveled to San Francisco two weeks ago, and achieved one of my long-standing personal goals. San Francisco never disappoints, even when it appears it will- before I met Ferlinghetti, I'd conversed at length with a Brazilian cab driver about Fernando Pessoa, the driver quoting Pessoa's poem "The Tobacco Shop" and talking about how Pessoa runs in the veins of all Brazilians and all Portuguese speakers. Chileans feel Neruda. Do Americans have any poetry left in our desiccated vessels?
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I saw the sparkling eyes I’d sought standing
beside me on the chaotic corner of
Columbus and Broadway, North Beach San Francisco,
and I’d forgotten the journey, forgotten why
I’d put up with all-night trucks and
street fights, crowded cafes, and deliciously
heart-stopping cheesesteaks, I’d come here
to see Ferlinghetti, to shake his hand
and say thank you and to maybe
grab hold of the vanishing muse leaving
for its next host, old man Ferlinghetti
still bright and healthy, but he’s not
forming memories anymore, and slowly
this world’s slipping from him, and
Vaclav Havel, and the peacemonger poets of
the last great generation need new troops
to battle in these ongoing wars over hearts,
love must rise over all, above the conflicts
and the cancers and the technologies expanding
out beyond our control, eating the wonder-filled eyes
of youth before our children can absorb
all the glittering lights of hope
and promise, the return to Eden we
bring forth in words and fantasies,
the trail to Nirvana is a steep climb and
generations fade as they carry the
young to unforeseen heights,
Mr. Ferlinghetti, let me take the
sherpa’s guiding hold up this
once unscaleable mountain,
and we’ll dance together in the new sunlight
that will shine the morning’s dawn
from this mortal ledge
where we’ll part ways.
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As it is almost Valentine's Day, I tried to get the muse to sing to me about love.
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I’m not a sorceress though I studied how to corral
the wind for you, I spent my days collecting
the secret clues you left in empty beer glasses
and marijuana smoke, and alone in the
library at night, I drew pictures
and sang nonsense lyrics, chanting the hours away
for the half-second flash that might
tell me what the last step is, what
I need to do to harness the sun for you,
to catch the air I breathe and give it to you,
to clear my eyes of fear’s fog and look at you,
I don’t have the serpent’s powers you forever
see in me, I haven’t spoken to the deities
you feel through me,
and my name is not Diana, or Andromeda, or Helen,
I’m nothing more, nothing less than a girl growing
older, a girl who didn’t find the truth
at home and came here to escape all the
simple stares and loveless sensibility that
trapped me in an eyeless universe, now I’m here
and I want to make magic for you,
I want to enchant this city with you,
I want to laugh at the mad ones
and sneer at the sane,
and dance all day and sing,
and your eyes tell me you’re ready
you’re waiting for the resurrection,
and all I am is a confused woman bound
in love and loathing, and I
can’t possibly become your Messiah.
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She’ll just vanish one day, unannounced, a new job,
a magic spell, a sudden journey, maybe death,
and like Dante you’ll never get answers from disappeared
lips, nor from conscious eyes waiting for
the stormy waves of words and wonder
to roll away like the seasons and the stars,
Orion aims his bow all winter but never shoots
before the world has spun his targets
to the sunny side of this ever-expanding universe,
she’ll take her place in his cosmos and leave
you revolving through a lifetime of seasons
none warm enough or cold enough, wet enough
or dry enough to force the words cast in
stone out of that disembodied throat,
maybe you’ll find yourself escaping that
death bed to weep on a cold grave
and cry out your desperate pleas to
six feet of soil that will just soak
up your words and tears and
blossom with the same grass, over and over,
but even then you won’t get answers,
you’re trapped in the questions now,
bars on your cell window
you spill page upon page after this
solitary fantasy quest, turn it over
in a tumult of dreams and terrors,
and you can’t call out the commands
that haunt your every step,
she’s just waiting, with the answers, yes
or no, and you’d rather spend your life
alone with the questions unanswered.
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I tried something a bit different in San Francisco.
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I deserve to be fondled by the muse!
I’ve paid her dues
in sleepless nights and prosaic fights
wrestling with messages
uncertain delusions
dribbles of drivel that lead to light
the sorry shade
of simple words obscuring
the fatal following of
footsteps that fade to
frozen stammers and
dread too heavy for
sore arms
I’ve made my way up the side of
her unmountable mountain
screaming in terror like
a Zen buddhist absorbing
the shockwave roll
of an unsteady world
wrapped the wrong way
around the revolutions of
reluctant renegades
I deserve to be fondled by the muse!
Come tonight and
unshackle this shadow
and turn these
uncertain lights
into verse enchantments
that chase away
these shrinking nights.
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Back to making a living now... the America poet has to figure out how to make capitalism and the muse coexist if he wants to eat.
This and all past dispatches are now captured online at http://mikeygolightly.blogspot.com
May the Aquarius sun continue to deliver your indescribable dreams.
