J. de Salvo over at the Oakland Review blog has written a review of my new collection of San Francisco Bohemian tales from the Reagan era, Poison and Antidote. Check it out.

 

 

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

 

The Art of Combustion

Plain as the stone on your face.

Row your safety to napalm

notes, afraid as flame shrinking

from water ‘n’ crackling for air.

                                    There is a life

in chemical reactions. Raw materials

colliding, combusting, and accruing

sedimentary corrosion.

                                    Moving elements collide,

redefine neutrons in an atomic closet, abide

in particle performances and material matters—

The touch

                        Of Mark Pauline’s fingers,

caught between machines

and the nature of unstable

science’s elemental tenements,

                                     both positive

and negatively charged.

                        1/2015

                        Florence

An interview with the author as an old man

Ghanian poet and blogger Geosi Gyasi interviewed me! Click on this text to check it out.

"Glare of shoosh"

Glare of shoosh,

Din of protest, personal

and urgent, meaningless

shrieking babies. They know

life is miserable. But we learn

to smile, learn to love the living

hell in our loins, the dull ache

of solitude in the circle

of those who claim to have our back

and tell us we are not

fat. I am a fat fuck

,on an airplane, dreaming

of skewering the tiny larynx

of a baby with a prickly

plastic fork—unrepentant.

5/29/2015

Munich-San Francisco, in transit

Survived By

Heart strap

thread of renewal

blood through a mucus membrane

stop. it don’t stop

thread through a needle’s eye

wet throng of need

don’t ever stop

need, the relative

            pronoun implying possession

            Demons

in the boom box

strung over shoulders

resent rhythms

life’s train

            don’t derail

            dare not stop

            taking ways

            away.

                                    9/14/94

                                      NYC

"The view"

The view:

A point

Of turpitude

Repatriate

Papal

Perception. Heightened

Urban

Guerrilla / Indian

Visits the Vatican

Museum

A stylish

Middle-aged

Telefonino

--

Unburdened

W/ doom

At dawn

Occhio!

Nighttime

Animals

Egotism

Disaffected

In mission:

Existential

Anachronism’s

Agenda

And away

                        We go.

3/20-21/2015

Rome

"Au-delà"

Au-delà

There / not there

The word of place

Locus located

Tales collated in Lotus

Land, related

To others as in a grammar—

Locution forgetting particular

Placements for continuities

Associations inter coining

Phrases nor ever setting

Faces read through clouds

Moving across an interior sky

3/21/2015

Rome

"The Cadaver Synod"

I have a  short story in the latest issue of The Prodigal's Chair. It's called "The Cadaver Synod" and is a historical fiction regarding the infamous trial of the corpse of Pope Formosus in 897--perfect for your Easter celebrations! The story is one from my novel-in-frames-in-progress The Three Living Meet the Three Dead.

Click on these words to read it. Feel free to comment. Enjoy!

Santa Maria Novella Station’s soft

Fascism: barricades, budella

Della tu’ ma’, bunkers

soldiers shouting through cellphones

at unlistening travelers.

Everyone runs from the trumpet

the mayor’s thugs shove

up our ass. The city’s visiting card:

a boot stamping on a human

face for eternity, Florence,

Your humanism is the worst sham

A travel agent ever sold.

3/24/2015

Florence

Coming up on St. Patrick's Day at St. Mark's English church in Florence: I will be reading, accompanied by drumming, sounds, and music!

"Now that I have seen Boniface"

Now that I have seen Boniface

In his niche at Orvieto

Along the solitary thread of Italy’s

Appennino, of Pasolini’s imagined

Homeland and its search for the meaning

Of material history, of Dante’s “serva

Italia,” anyone’s date for a buck…

Now that Edward Snowden’s

Contribution to free speech

Has been eclipsed by dirty

Cartoons (of the prophet’s anus)

And Nietzsche has eaten

His own feces in the absence

Of a living God, and the best of us

—in this first world bubble in which I travel—

are only marking time

‘til things get better, putting

our faith in struggles so personal

they are all but invisible

on the outside—even in Orvieto

on its tufa-stone island

high above the floodplain of the Paglia

like a rudderless rock lost

in a sea of millennia, all

its secrets sunk in caves

hidden beneath the day-

to-day business of business…

now that I know nothing

shows on the outside, nothing

is real—between the intention

and the act—I’m more or less happy

to lay down my belief

in the concept of “a future.”

                        1/8/2015

                        Orvieto