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