Hello friends and readers!

After an extended sojourn away from verse and away from the microphone, I'm happy to announce that Mikey Golightly will be resurfacing next Monday, November 2, reading as a featured reader in the Caffeinated Art series at 3 Friends Gallery, along with fellow poet rick j and singer/songwriter Mindy Dillard. I'll be reading both old and new, and if time permits (and is there ever enough time these days?) I hope to have available my long-promised 3rd chapbook, which will be tentatively titled "Let's Save The World With Poetry". I'd love to see you there and re-acquaint you with the energy of Mikey Golightly and the strange power of poetry.

3 Friends Coffee House is at SE 12th and Ash in Portland. The reading starts at 7, and I'm not certain what the order will be.

I hope to see you there!

Here's two new poems to whet your appetite for Monday night...
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"Apollo finds Daphne in the Cascades"

Daphne of the springs, I come to you here as
a master of the herbs and a son of myth,
and I beg you to stay here and join me in
song and dream, in wonder and fantasy,
in the delight of trees grown strong from the waters.
Please don't escape to the tangled understory,
the blackberry vines and their mushroom guardians
lay a misty trap at every forest juncture
and there you will be lost to me forever,
embraced by the time-gnarled arms and
the heavy ancient shadows of the Oregon firs,
and I will chase you deep into the trees,
though my ankles snap and my sallow heart withers
with every pulsing beat made without you, without
your mystifying touch, the gentle pressure
that could finally release me
from this love-rending pursuit.
Please Daphne, know that I am not the son of
a God and cannot sentence you to a life of despair
though I doom myself to the absurd courtship
of this magic I once dreamed under Cascade skies.
Daphne I am merely a man enchanted by
your river-borne hair, your incandescent body,
the cut of the stars and the fountains of heaven
I saw when I looked through your naked charms,
looked where my eyes were forbidden to see.
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Phillippi Canyon (Exit 123)

The noose cinches itself around the highway’s end,
drivers don’t need a map when the signs are
all gone and every car rolls to the
same destination anyhow,
does anyone take that middle of nowhere exit
anymore, the one narrow road up some
sun-starved canyon, no billboards for miles,
not even a rusted-out water tower and
a boarded-up 1920’s service station
(so why’s there even an off-ramp here) ?
Best to just cruise along in the middle lane,
stay on the interstate where it’s never
too far from another overpriced fuel stop,
the city folk can afford an extra twenty cents
per gallon while the locals can barely
keep their rustbuckets running, or
hold the wind and snow out of
crumbling trailers on
American Dream 640 acres, now down
to 10 dead ones and a tiny
cemetery just past the back door,
the interstate keeps the news away,
let the roadbound assembly line citizens
wear ruts into the highway pavement, thirty feet wide,
this country’s got thousands more miles
if you’re not afraid of the rattlesnakes
and a blown tire on a gravel road
that would probably turn out to be a dead end anyhow,
bring a loaded pistol, though, because
you just might have to shoot a hole
through the padlocked fence across
those public lands still our lands, too.
Back on the interstate they won’t even
hear a shotgun blast through air conditioning and
cell phones and in-car movies and
the lonely hitchhiker wondering
why all these blind drivers ever left home,
the lemmings can stay on their ledges
and follow each other off of city center cliffs,
leave the real West to the seekers
who feel the whistling land in their bones
and sleep only long enough
to keep the voyage going again, every tomorrow morning.