Waitin’ for the Vaccine Blues

 

As if in auto-

Citation, San Francisco

Calls up some wind

And a little fog

Today.

 

                        My mind

Wanders in empty fields

Of Covid time, end-

Less and finite

As a lost dog.

 

                        I walk

Where the traffic lights

Bid me and Alamo Square

Is where I sit

 

And where San Francisco

Writes itself

Into my note-

Book.

 

                        Half a million

American souls

Know it’s true.

 

 

 

                                    2/2/2021

                                    Alamo Square, SF

 

 

Another cool, gray San Francisco day

,July, toward the end of the world.

I will never see clearly again

except through glass. I’ll

walk ‘til my legs give out, I suppose,

looking hard at the outside of things.

Love will be my mantra

‘gainst all this American suspicion, hate,

and self-repression. By tomorrow

you’ll have forgotten you ever read this

but I’ll remember that you did.

I’m the archivist of nothing in particular.

July, 5^th, 2016

San Francisco

San Francisco II

Although it’s all visually familiar

the city only

                        feels like home

In the Tenderloin.

                                    Leavenworth St.’s “got

that home beat,” that

Je ne sais quoi

                        on the edge

of desperation. Transsexual

with a laptop on the sidewalk

purse open: smokes, blankets,

and that smell bathrooms

                                                were built

to neutralize.

                        Sometimes places

are hard to get to because

they’re even harder to get out of.

This lowlife

                        misses

                                    the camaraderie

                                    of abject survival. After all,

smiles are brighter

                                    against

                                    your suburban misery,

                                    Mr. Jones—

where it all happens without you

and my head is the only

                                                incongruity,

since all the places it carries around

only bring me home 

to the cool, gray city

                                                of love.

June, 2016

San Francisco

From Florence to "Frisco"

Fail-safe sun, bridges

and layers of time.

Wariness—we’re not all

Sweethearts here, either.

Rather cautious, taciturn.

“Shining our little flashlights

in your face.” Bay people,

peninsula people, half in,

as if poker were

our sport, sport.

One foot in noir

and the other

a surfer boy.

“You can’t be

from California,” she told me

a long time ago,

“you’re not blonde.”

7/30/2015

San Francisco

Marine Layer

An eerie rayon rhino madly

rams any yellow armor,

airs his dry rinds

down here. Night falls

heavy on San Francisco.

6/15/2015

San Francisco

Photograph by Debra A. Zeller.

The Brautigan Streets

I close my eyes and try to walk the Brautigan streets of San Francisco, knowing full well that they’ve been sold to Silicon Valley for some time. It all started when they knocked down the oldest bar in town to build a prison block of cement condos as part of the Coca-Cola ballpark for that baseball team that no one had ever heard of before they accidentally won the World Series. Now they accidentally win the World Series every other year.

            Still, I can only sigh at San Francisco’s protracted suicide. Sadness and trespass and pride. And my own worst emotional flaw, nostalgia. Brautigan left me the streets but I did nothing to keep them clean. I expected poverty to do it for me, to put up more of a fight. But San Francisco, too, was complacent, unconcerned, and weak. Even now, it’s probably looking the other way while its pockets get picked once again.

2/24/2015

Bologna

 

Poison and Antidote

I know that things have been rather quite here on my blog this last year and I can explain: I have been busy preparing my second book and moving towards completing the revision of my first novel. While these pursuits have rather preempted the production of the shorter and musicated recordings of the kind of work that filled much of my first book, Sojourner, I am proud to announce that my second volume, a collection of nine inter-related short stories of the artists, musicians, Bohemians, strippers, and druggies of the San Francisco art and music scene of the first half of the 1980's is mere weeks away from publication.

If you're at all intrigued and want to browse in the collection, seven of the nine stories have already been published in various magazines and journals. There's a list with link on my website. Stay tuned for more details and the release date!

House Hunting

The kind editors of STREETLIGHT Magazine have published the opening story of my upcoming collection Poison and Antidote. Click on the picture to read, share, like--please. (Scroll down, it's the second story.)

Testament of Faith

A brand-new online literary magazine called One Throne has published a story from my upcoming collection Poison and Antidote called "Testament of Faith." The editor calls it "A love story short on time but long on memory." I couldn't have said it better myself! (Click on the picture to read it)

Reading / Book Signing

My West-Coast book promotion tour begin this coming Thursday evening at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I will perform texts from Sojourner in the spirit of artistic anarchy with my trusty Dada drum. Come have a glass of wine, say hello, listen, shout back, sing along, and get a book signed.

Full Book Tour info here.

Florence

A Dream

"Don’t you dare quench my insatiable boredom"

 

Don’t you dare quench my insatiable boredom

in yr breathtaking clothes, that mask you wear

on the back of yr head—bang

that tambourine, Dick! Evolution

makes you taller. Tempting terrain

of pissed-on boots, aquiline noses

and the return of knickers,

boxers, and big-bra biddies

moving off towards the powder

keg in the backroom where the tap is

always dripping.

Mustache man falters with the cigarette

bit, bumble nose boy weaves

,not looking, past his mascara

lips lubing the slick beer stem,

spittle warming the cool glass knob.

Face powder becomes your holy-

cost, hologram, hot-toddy thump

of the mechanical bass on the lower breast

bone.

Touch

            and go, porno sonorous gaydar

has released all of our mysteries to the wheel

but for the odor. Rawer meat

and standing water. Heat comes down

a fool to her weight, pats herself off

to it. Aglow, I spy Ms. dreamy beneath the telephone

light, before the piss-pots. Having

been groomed by the doorman, shy abdicates

my face to the wall: flower pot

caught in the hoar-frost. Hep hep me

realign ‘er, get her offa that harp, ‘at ship

of our ingenuity sailing to some higher service

out of a blinding night as white as this

to that great, golden

fuck up in the sky.

6/16/1992

San Francisco

(Kennel Club, née VIS, now Independent)

INBETWEEN --5 chapters

I

All that winter they were ripping up the streets of Europe, the streets of Paris and Florence, the streets of Rome. Scaffolding circles churches, hides triumphal arches, strips of green nylon tarpaulin stretched across its planks and frames. Streets have been uprooted, cobblestones stacked against the walls of black buildings. They're turning hotels into museums, letting the steam out of the sewers, putting statues behind glass; policemen are looking on, machine guns slung over their shoulders. In Rome they don't have any portable electric lights; instead they use little pots of fire that look like the old-fashioned anarchist's bombs in silent movies to warn cars of the edges, where the streets drop off into dusty pits. 

He looks across a muddy hole filled with heavy machinery at a museum. Closed for renovation, the sign says. 

A whole street in the center of Florence has been ripped up; the exclusive shops face each other across a dank pit of reddish earth, and the walls of green-shuttered windows seem to close in on you as you look up. A little rain slips into the narrow streets as Persey hurries home carrying groceries. Other Americans and the well-to-do Florentines pass slowly, laden with colorful brand-name shopping bags. In Paris, between snow flurries, he watches them pouring out cement sidewalks in long strips down the Boulevard St. Michael; they were laying out the streets of Europe that winter. People pass in a hurry, nobody watching the police frisking some Arabs up against a wall.

FIRES ON MONKEY ISLAND (an honest to goodness parable!)

Penguin Island was once

Monkey Island

but San Francisco is

too cold for monkeys

so they put up

heaters on Monkey island

but monkeys (being monkeys)

tipped them over

frequently creating

fires on Monkey Island

that's how Monkey Island became

Penguin Island

               9/22/2009

               San Francisco

Fire on Monkey Island by Lee Foust