For my last post of the year, I’ve collected one old piece of writing and one new one. The first I dedicate to Dorothy (Dodo) Miller, who died last month at age 92. She was a true friend and source of light and good spirits. Her grand smile and always lovely greeting remains fixed in my memory.
This first piece was a word collage that I wrote somewhere around 1970, by taking books randomly off a shelf and opening and choosing random phrases from them, one after another. I had in mind the work of Kurt Schwitters, whose collages I’d seen at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the cut-up writings of William S. Burroughs along with the cubist period of modern art. I’ll let you decide whether it works:
Collage 1
That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was floating on an updraft of politics … summer hot air as it were … slowly melting like open admiration over the countenance of Wright Diehl, the man who a dozen times in the past had explained events as the outcome of character or intentions, the personal defeat of this or that statesman … or the boom of water in the rising gorge.
Now he sat stringing himself out endlessly into the hazy noonday sunshine … Nearby Moira Mayheekana, gifted with sound, obstinate, practical common sense, swayed mischievously in the evanescent wind, sand and stars … standing out against the edge of day while their son Form shrieked joyfully in his winding sheet.
At nightfall … with the hoarse clamor of a dreamboat steamboat barking out at sea guiding myriads of tiny flames across the ocean … came an odor of parrots, cockatoos and art dealers wafting across the hours to his ears with memories of a curious sense of relief.
“That fellow I knocked down was her brother,” he recalled absently, presently gazing at the subject. “Mine, too.”
He laughed then, a golden necklace of laughter links from his throat cast out into the gracious evening breeze like blown kisses, lusty in the true style of the old court.
“Till we have faces! Till we have faces!” he called, stooping to pick up a fallen sparrow at his feet … amazed to find it was only his shoe that had come off.
(c) Bob Loomis
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This second piece is one I improv’d yesterday at the dentist’s office & completed this morning after earlier rereading some of Bob Kaufman’s Cranial Guitar. I dedicate it to his memory:
Homage to Bob Kaufman
used to actually SEE you pass on the street, usually Grant Avenue or in the Coffee Gallery drinking beer … listening to Young Rabbits by the Jazz Crusaders on the jukebox … drinking a beer or two … in sainted serape & tilted hat … not talking in those days … not declaiming the Abomunist Manifesto … eyes silent, too, & dark … waiting for wars to end … for legal state murders to end … waiting for God to admit his malfeasance, admit mistaken identity … give refunds on all unsatisfactorily answered prayers … return all to sinlessness …
waiting for top intellectual guns to stop misfiring … stop contracting out services to the highest bidders … waiting for everyone to learn via TV how to be gourmet chefs … cook up something grand & epiphanal … holy wafers to surpass all holy wafers … a more erudite poetry spun like fine webs of music from saxophones of jazz deities … Howard Hesseman behind the bar waiting wryly for his career to take off … thinking he’d use you in TV series … you’d be the weird guy down the street babbling sermons & host of late-night jazz show no one listens to … together you’d make avante-garde movies in between walks up & down Columbus Avenue & Broadway and upper Grant & all North Beach … & the universe ...
& back to tiny flat and wife & son & happy marriage of mind and soul … a marital heaven … or hell … or both … sinuosities of fleshy connections … check coordinates please, get location …
lunch break over, back to work, everybody has a job that’s disappeared from the Blueknighted States … everybody’s work gone to Asia … all Asia seeking bliss in factory production & export business … nobody left here with money to buy anything … except Big Boys … & god bless the child that’s got his own …
Bob Kaufman same initials as Burger King … BK the burgeria did not exist back in the day … Tic Toc Burgers up on Columbus … good place to score a bite to eat in wee hours … no worries then about cow methane & global warming … chow down in ignorant bliss ... or go get good glass of port at San Remo bar … long-gone now, all … replaced by Burger King et all … flipping gaseous patties … try the 99-cent value meal! ... as cheap & filling as Tic Toc … righteous manna from pole-axed cattle …
BK the poet unknown to me then ... mysterious cat in hat & serap' … I in callow marshmallow youth … now tops my Beatnik Hall of Fame list … spouted verse extemporaneously, then suddenly shut up … vow of silence till ‘Nam war’s end … now silent forever except in libraries … schools? … memories … books still available City Lights … maybe even Amazon dot com … maybe even China? … perhaps reincarnated as capitalistic purchaser of politicians? … lobbyist for Big Bucks & chemically fed beeves? … no! never! … no soul or stomach for sale here … no fast-food poesies … no drive-thru poetry … no metered verbal value meal … no cheap shots …
just two dark eyes brooding over glutenless breakfast ricecake muffin … humming modal songs from beyond … ghost-walking North Beach streets in search of boho hearts ... finding trendy wifi bars, cafes … adios, mofo! … keep stroking Cranial Guitar … keep serenading generations to come …
© Bob Loomis, 12-11-2009
Happy Holidays to all!
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