
Month: April 2018
Finn Hall
Reading at Finn Hall, 4/28/18
“San Rafael/Mexico City Blues Poem”
Prologue
A superficial reading of one of these poems [in the book of lyrics by Kerouac] led me to believe he was referring to Burroughs — the section where Kerouac is taking down the words of old junkie Bill Garver — I think he calls him Bill Gaines — “Boy if you only knew how good dem bacons and dem eggs is, you’d give up poetry boy and dig in,”etc. — the theme carries through about five choruses [of the book].
O magic countless in time this morning, O risen sun late on the horizon,
San Rafael, your office workers with shiny hair and backpacks
a tow in endless motion and still asleep on sleek commuter buses
do not notice the copy of Mexico City Blues beside my bag on the seat cushion
next to me.
This workaday I will play tag with Kerouac,
and I am still in that reverie as the bus pulls into
a transfer stop.
Now workers with grit-worn shirts standing in line at a deli quick stop
smile as they fill
cups of coffee and pay.
In the Canal the street are dim candlelight from the ones holding prayer vigils against the ICE raids
shines in sweet candescence.
Earth kisses the sun through them.
Carl Macki
ii sing of love’s purity
while my anger rises from my
chest as my sweat rolls down my
waist
unbroken chain of being, how can I hold you? I don’t need to,
the summer signs into my heart and
the warmth melts my ire as I too am into the reason that sunlight now seems forever
We wanted her to be like a figure in a painting by Botticelli [or a China doll]
instead, we got Jackson Pollock [in all his glory]. Gerry gave me her address before I landed in
L.A. I looked for her apartment in Hollywood. rang the bell and as we talked
spread my writings across her living room floor
The Dodgers won their game in Chavez Ravine that day it was still sunny
when we went to a Moroccan restaurant on Sunset overlooking the hotel where John Belushi died
It felt dizzy and not at all glamorous
[She was] like St. Lucy forced into prostitution And I some unnamed Sicilian jackal
Peddling saline drachmas in a salt-encrusted temple Of timeless interference
then Jan said “Pass the chiaroscuro–
my visions don’t work without the beats/
who played with black and white.” when she died, my vision was restored.
—
the bourgeois marxist
you say you are with the working people and wish to overthrow the ruling class even as you do not work and live off investments in oil, gas, and war. You say you abhor, but secretly love, the US Government for providing for you when you were down you’re a hybrid-Groucho Marxist rebel clown you support the dead illiterate dead as you consume your mother may Is in
a season of the great unrest where faith in ideologies are supposed to supplant all true faith and people you find insufficient because you disagree with them at all
I opened my eyes in orthodox beefcake. Genetic hitchhiker, randomly I was there, the
torch of careless stumbling through the fog passed down like a useless heirloom,
looming ubiquitously overhead.
child falters
like a feather in winter
magnified brilliantly a stamp blowing
the wind
you never washed your hair
you wanted me dead
lying to me after about what you said
Baudelaire’s Revenge
It was in a smile, he said Freud said it was in a joke
I don’t want to sicken and die because smiles and laughter
Pictures of death outside my window while joy is framed and sent to solitary religious mutes slicing through the air frozen
The patient survives
not because the cure works
but because for once he remembers what it is like in heaven
It is funny how I often
cannot follow a poem when spoken
but can be stunned by its clarity
when I read it.
Latif Harris was born in Los Angeles in 1940 and came to SF at the age of 19 in 1959, where he fell in with the Beat group of writers, becoming especially close with Philip Lamantia and Howard Hart and also the painter Robert LaVigne. He later studied with Robert Creeley in New Mexico
and Ed Dorn in London. He has traveled the world and lived for long periods out of the U.S., including a long stint in Greece. He has published several literary magazines and organized the last Beat reading series in North Beach at the Bannam Place Gallery in
the early 1980’s. His poetry crosses many boundaries, Buddhist, surrealist, Beat, Black Mountain. Most recently he edited and published the 50-year GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY ANTHOLOGY of BEATITUDE MAGAZINE.
Upon hearing Scott Pruitt has become Director of the EPA Hell’s purposes
found in turning back, the tide of guilt that soiled
the ground of understanding upon our soiled earth and this ensued from our own doing,
even said that this is how the formless luxury of forgiveness comes to bless and brighten our mind from the worries
Leviathan and its gyres would seem to hasten.
my father died of a sad heart my mother of cancer
my brother went from a blood clot in the brain. I have not gone on like some of my family
I remain as certain as salt in a liquid
that is not afraid of dissolving for anything else here
in this park between amidst love and joy
going to meet with a Friend in
Alameda/maybe I’ll pass too little to do
too much sun and rain are coming soon
free and in advance of the moon
I wanted to say that
your body is a river
for it flows into a sea we do not see
yet
we stand off
the imaginary, a prisoner
in our dream of death
so, endow us, love, for the sake of those
Sixty years into this gift Still wearing this body or is it wearing me
we will see our host: divinity
that have been pressed down and shaken
by the meaningless
now
as waves in the sea, where water and light
compound the elements and nothing remains apart.
we watch the world floats by us
& behol
d
the flickering beauty in contradiction
if not for the screams our heart makes
then for the love of God
and its remembrance comes a beauty that tears
and fingertips
tears at the
chambers of the
spirit
in this Universe
a prayer away
I am a nobody
that has risen through the ranks of ineptitude
to those
who have come before or after me
you have
my gratitude in this season of joy
I recognize the ken of right attitude
so, peace be upon us and may light shine upon all that you do.
a sad cosmos is about
to make good at last
Sixty years into this gift Still wearing this body or is it wearing me
we will see our host: divinity
— The Halo is Forever
–For Latif Harris (1940-2017)
|
Padma Sam bhava, we have obtained
continuation
not for it only marks
and the nothingness of all things for we have glimpsed
and gone through the process of aging through the body
and reached its end in futility yet have enjoyed the play
of substance dissolving in the clouds
like sunlight
now the mind is unfurled
unburdened by time embraced by eternity exquisite and absolute
our gratitude is expressed in | the | |
succulent, intimate | innocence of | |
unborn perfection.
Anubis walked with a limp–Jan Kerouac
We wanted her to be like a figure in a painting by Botticelli [or a China doll]
instead, we got Jackson Pollock [in all his glory]. Gerry gave me her address before I landed in L.A. I looked for her apartment in Hollywood.
rang the bell and as we talked
spread my writings across her living room floor
The Dodgers won their game in Chavez Ravine that day it was still sunny
when we went to a Moroccan restaurant on Sunset overlooking the hotel where John Belushi died
It felt dizzy and not at all glamorous
[She was] like St. Lucy forced into prostitution And I some unnamed Sicilian jackal
Peddling saline drachmas in a salt-encrusted temple Of timeless interference
when she died, my vision was restored.
Dear God, I am aching right now, and want you to heal me. I want to serve you to be one with You all the time and always. I want to lighten up, not take myself so seriously, to not take anything seriously. I want to have fun. To really enjoy myself. I
don’t want to work. I don’t want to play, or sleep either. I don’t want to die. Just rest in perfect love.
San Francisco
by Eugene Ruggles
I give you back your bridge. I have driven her too long without feeding the tides in her steel, her robes.
I give you back your hills and parks that rise together into islands of green cloth that line my one coat.
I give you back the full pockets of that one coat.
Where the wind is drinking
from the waters around your ankles I give you back this small room
I breathe from,
beneath the cathedral of your voice.