the outlaw poetry network

A.D. Winans and Bob Kaufman

REMEMBERING BOB KAUFMAN

He walked the streets of North Beach
An ancient warrior with hollow eyes
That seared the dazzling lights of the
City by the bay
His eyes boring into you
Like a drill
Carrying decades of heavy sorrow
On his back
like a bent-over hunchback
Overcome with the rust of time
Flesh stripped to the marrow
The mirror of his eyes doing a slow dance
Up and down Grant Avenue
A dark shadow riding clouds of
“Ancient Rain”
His life measured in hot jazz and verse
A surreal mirage where hip cats
Wailed in precision rhythm
As he walked an imaginary zoo
Looking for tigers to talk too
Runaway poems blaring in his ears
Like a stuck car horn
The Ancient Rain falling
………….falling
………………………..falling
Washing away his wounds

A.D. Winans and Jack Micheline

POEM FOR JACK MICHELINE

He was the high note of a wailing saxophone
The spark that ignites a fire
He was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s
A glass of imported beer
A shaman
A vagabond poet shuffling words
Like a river-boat gambler

Ravished by illness
Ravished by time
He painted his visions on canvass
In parks in bars and coffee houses
His poems singing out across the
Streets of America
Pure innocence
Pure genius
Spinning words that hung in the air
Like a hummingbird drunk on the
Pollen of life

WOMAN ON THE BALCONY

I see her two
three times a week
sitting on the balcony
when weather permits
here in old Italy town
in what is left of North Beach
her robe slightly parted
thumbing through the pages of a book
taking no notice of the people down below

standing to stretch, she yawns
legs like sturdy pillars that stretch
to reach the sky into the boundaries
of my mind
my eyes begging to read the pages
she turns with sensual fingers
wanting just one quick look
one intimate journey into the pages
into the space between the
parting of her robe
a journey to forbidden places
a flight back in time
to another place another world
high on a balcony where
I too ignore the
people coming and going
down below

ON MY WAY TO BECOMING A MAN

On my way to Lackland Air Force Base
The train stopped to take on passengers
Giving me the chance to get off
Stretch my legs and relieve myself

On returning from the men’s room
An elderly black man approached me
Wanting to know where the restroom was
And when I pointed in the direction
Of where I had just come from
He shuffled his feet nervously
And said, “No, the colored room”
And being naïve and from the North
I had no idea what he was talking about
When suddenly a woman came running
Out from behind a concession stand
Her face red with anger
Yelling for the old man
To leave me alone
As I tried in vain
To calm her down
Telling her it was all right
He was only looking for the
Men’s room
“That boy knows where the colored room is”
She said, shooing the old man away
As I boarded the train
Turning to see him
Bent over a “colored” only
Water fountain
Ss the train picked-up steam
Sparks flying from the tracks
Taking me on my way
To becoming a man
Where I would have
My serial number branded into
My head
And made to wear a dog tag
Around my neck
To remind me
I was the property of Uncle Sam

RETURNING HOME FROM PANAMA

They had this bar at Ocean beach
Called the Chalet
It used to be a hangout for vets
The American Legion boys
Most of them fat and balding
The years piling up like litter
One so old that
He claimed he was gassed in
WW 1
You never knew whether
To believe him or not
He just sat there staring
Talking into his beer
Humming a song:
OVER HERE OVER THERE
And using terms like
Dough Boy and Pill Box
And you just somehow knew
He had to have been there
Was still there would always be there

OLD WARRIOR OF NORTH BEACH

He walks the streets of North Beach
Looking like an old man
With eyes empty as a broken parking meter
Unemployable weighed down by the years
His mind heavy as an anchor dragging the
Bottom of the ocean floor
Forgotten rebel playing old ballads
In the shipwreck of his heart
His mind destroyed by shock treatments
And one too many police batons
At night he dreams
He is riding with Geronimo
Has imaginary conversations
With Charlie Parker
Rides the ferry with Miles Davis
Getting off at Bourbon Street
To down a drink with Kerouac
He shares a cigarette with Charlie Chaplin
At the old Bijou theater
Walk the battlefields with Walt Whitman
Rides the plains with Red Cloud
In search of the last buffalo
Walking the streets of North Beach
In search of the elusive ginger fish smell
Death a sightless chauffeur
Waiting like a concubine facing another
Apocalyptic day

CITY POET

Once addiction sets in
There is no stopping it
You become a serial killer
Attacking the keyboard at will
Your mind working in shifts
Strange creatures live inside your head
Show no mercy give no ground
Forcing your fingers to do their bidding
Writing down your thoughts in your
Loose-leaf notebook

The city is your slaughterhouse
Like a wife it accommodates your moods
Doesn’t seem to mind you giving
Her a bad name
You walk her streets a hungry vampire
Lapping up your own blood
On nights when blood transfusions
Are not enough

FOR BERNIE

Survivor
Old-timer
In search of a fix
Burned spoon hovering over
Hot flame
Like a moth drawn to a light-bulb
Arm stretched tight with rubber band
Liquid death riding sunken vein
Resembling a cowboy looking
Forward to the last trail drive

GOING BACK IN TIME

I was looking at my scrapbook
the other night while listening
to an old Dylan record
and there I was in my youth traveling
traveling from California to Arizona and places
and places further west
heading in so many directions
it was like getting lost in the trick-mirrors
at the old fun house
and there were the women
then young girls
free flowing spirits who gave
their minds and bodies
at the slightest invitation
and nights too lying alone
in tangled sleep feeling like a deer
caught in barbed-wire
or sitting hunched over cold and disheveled
at the local Greyhound station
fighting off the eyes of leering men
who preferred boys to women
Now sixty-five and counting
I realize I was there and back so fast
like a train running out of track
returning home carrying my life
in a Knapp-sack
the days the months the years
hung out to dry
like your mother’s washing
on an old clothesline

ghost(s) solstice

Sometimes they’re nothing more than
birds driven to distraction
by the wind,
sometimes they’re the colors of
dawn’s indulgent appetite to
soften everything,
sometimes a pod of killer whale
shaped clouds
swimming across
solstice sky;
you can catch them in winter
on the edge of the Rio Grande
listening to the soul’s
still river.

They haunt the men who would
aspirate war,
sometimes, they hang feelings no
longer of use to us
on a red trembling moon.

The guardian angels of those who would
squirm under the border wire in
hellish desert silence, the
laundry of the dispossessed hangs
in shreds on mesquite thorns, they
follow ghost tracks, hang their thirst
on ghost winds, just above the ground that
rise with the heat in dispossessed whispers-

the brittle rib cage remains
of a riderless horse are pale in the sun.

she leaves her imprint in sweat against
a shaded rock, raven’s wings erupt out of the
stain & its feathers brush her face as she
trudges north.

Say the Moon

The year 2012
Your kids can go.
Too crowded here.
Not enough fast food
or rice for that matter.
It stinks, the air does.
No one walks without crutches
or a little cart that
scoots the forever aisles
in search of owner.
So why not the moon?
A station to STOP
Take care of the body business.
Johnny on the Moon Spot.
We can call it that.
Proceed to Mars later on.
Use caution.
Leave germs at home.
It’s for sale.
But watch the red sand.
It might be communist or worse.
Why wait?
Sign up now.

Migratory Obsession

Requires eagerness to fly
a hunch about low expectations
a slightly cynical, sexually explicit
right to hoot at strange feelings.
Credit cards excepted.

The Bishop

Richard, you’re dying and you
didn’t tell me until now?
This is way beyond the hilarity
of taxicabs we drove full tilt
down Taylor Street scaring the be Jesus
out of tourists, driving ten hours flat
for a yard, or sometimes nothing at all.
Cigarette butt hanging from your lips.
Cabs too small for your long legs.
“The Blue Cloud is around me,” you wailed.
Now you say it’s, “The HIV.”
You can’t say the rest.

Always broke, sloppy and a mess
your apartment, a gargantuan one-man disaster.
Your cat, the nastiest black and white reflection
of hate and madness, who ate spinach
from the crisper and tore my ankle to shreds.
How we raged against power mowers
The drone of overhead planes.
How we drove wildly, trapped by dark
laughter and hilarious circumstance.
How money or lack of it,
tore morality from our pockets.

This is the time I feared.
How many times did I say
stay close. Don’t isolate
when I meant friends need
each other to overcome hatred
and indifference my Buddhist
Shaman, macrobiotic cigarette smoker
chained to pack, ashtray and the beach.

I shall miss your joyful guffaws
when we met at Aquatic Park.
You, afraid of the cold deep bay
swam close to shore, sunned belly-down
a brown seal with blue eyes that danced
the mischief of a hundred bishops.
How we sat between silence, surf, bongo drums
talking about the women, the books
the money and yes, our foolish ways.

Good God it might have been me
telling you I’m sick, me
living with fear of wheeze, drafts
tainted blood caught in endless
nights of flashing teeth.

Richard, I wish my calls had been
more frequent, my letters clearer.
Maybe if I said, Richard I love you.
Maybe if I had stayed in San Francisco.
Damn, you never told me
though I might have guessed.

Hell, I’m glad you have Roseanne
to see you through forty meds a day
the doctor’s dance and as you say
the macro, the micro, the acupuncture
herbs, teas, rubs
the old sweat on the neck
hold-me-in-your-arms
unspeakable crying nights.

Today the fog draws near the hills
and passes down my body like smoke.
Today is quiet, hushed, the coffee’s good.
The waitress says, “That’s sad,”
referring to someone else.

Dick where is that taxicab in the sky?
or as a mustang Lieutenant standing
on the fantail of a cruiser in Honolulu once asked
“Why doesn’t the sun come up
at night when we need it.”

Dick, I lift my breast to great laughter
sweetness, pure foolish and goofy ideas
of what, who and why madness flew in our veins.
I thank you for our just plain pippin along
like a couple of sage pigeons picking the streets
for sense, or Jesus Christ, Dollars if YOU PLEASE!

Dear Dick, wherever you go and you will go
this time, save a place on the slab for me.
Keep the cement warm and your dear face
turned to the absurd and sometimes clear
side of the moon. We will go on.

Hi, I’m a Poet

See me
Poet me
You know
One of those
A, you know
Poets? Yes

Language poet
Yes, no, I’m a magical thinking
No, well yes
But look
I’m a poet
You were there
Yes at the
Reading
Poetry, yes

But no
I’m a poet
Beat, no poet
But that’s maybe
Buddhist
Yes, but look here
I’m a poet
I mean really
You can see
Between the lines
That I have
Something
To say
Surreal, that’s it
Like, like, like
You know a poet
A street poet
Close to slam but no
I’m a pet
No poet
Poet, that’s what
I said
The anthology yes
And he’s not
You know it’s
Like Delmore
Said at the bear
No I mean bar,
Like, Like bar.
the White Horse
No it was the Orange Cafe
He said, “There’s
only one thing better
than a second rate
poet and that’s
a first rate poet and you
my friend
are no poet at all.”
That’s what he said
I’m a poet
Listen to this

Please click the cover if you are interested in buying this book…

People, Not so Much

Every single one of them has a nose
lying right in front of the jaws,
telling them whether to slip a tongue
or sink the teeth into a face.
And way down at the other end
most of them have some sort of stump
that tells one what the nose thought,
as if you’d need a reminder by then.

True of mountain lions, poodles, deer,
rhesus monkeys, alligators, bears,
and a whole lot of things with furry hair.
People not so much, though. Sometimes
you have to unwrap them and probe
because with people the teeth can lie,
and the nose may make that little stumpy thing
something a bit bigger and harder to handle,

which is something you’d like to know about
to know maybe if the ends justify the means.

There is a lovely muscularity pervading Jared Smith’s work that’s reminiscent of the more obvious long-lined poets’ efforts, Whitman’s and C.K. William’s, for example. But Smith’s poetry is unique in that he seems, unlike these other two writers, not to think in terms of an “overflowing line” but to peer, consistently, beyond it. What this means is that while Whitman’s long lines are incantatory and Williams’ are loquacious in a relaxed, double-hexameter sort of way, Smith’s work, much like an Action Painter’s, serves the ambition of the gesture and thus, of necessity, stretches beyond the canvas. — Terri Brown-Davidson

Rhapsodic is a word applicable to very few poets today. Jared Smith is one—triumphantly so in Grassroots. And what powerful roots these poems are. Let me speak out clear and bold: in this superb collection of lyric poems…. Smith’s contemporary rhapsodic yawp [sounds] like Thor’s hammer over the boardrooms and the war rooms and the stock exchanges and the spires and domes of the world. Poetry might not make anything happen, but this poet knows what happens without it. Read him and be grateful. — George Drew, author of American Cool

With Grassroots, Jared Smith continues to explore human longing, sorrow, and resilience.… His content is singular, specific, concrete, but it always functions sublimely, pointing towards the grander cycles of Eros and Thanatos. Here is a poet deep with thought and rich with emotion. Grassroots is a compelling, haunting, and unforgettable collection, one that I’ll be revisiting and referencing for years to come. — John Amen, Editor of The Pedestal Magazine; author of At The Threshold of Alchemy

Smith casts a wide net that seines in diverse images from nature and domestic life that revitalize our sense of the wildness of our existence on this planet. I can think of no other American poet who can credibly carry us, in the span of a single line break, from buckets of cornflakes to trawlers filled with fish—and make that connection seem inevitable. — Allen Hoey, author of Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s and Stricter Means: Selected Earlier Poems

Click here to listen to Jared Smith read “Grassroots Listen to Jared Smith read GRASSROOTS

Much more on Jared Smith can be found on his web page by clicking here…