FROM BAY TO BAY
After an Italian meal
in San Francisco
eating a murdered calzone
at an outside cafe
after seeing a Fellini movie
then playing jazz
on a metallic piano
with an accordion player
accompanying me
will share a glass of cianti
now taking notes
on the waterfront
in the clumsy breeze
with flying sea gulls
in the colossal late sun
with the Bay still on my lips
for future expressionism
in my verse
an alarm goes off
with a shiver of lamentation
knowing I have to take
a return flight
direct to the Bay State
back to a Cape Cod gig
yet thinking
I spot Ferlinghetti
with my urban poems
on his laptop
in a vacant parking lot
throwing out a kiss
thinking he heard me play
my music passages
at the outside restaurant
on this subterranean twilight
know these dicey beat notes
has me smashed over
my impressionist mind
between two host ocean cities
will emerge in a future poem.
IMPROVISATION #1
Some nights pass
with jugs of wine
passing trembling hands
as a sudden May cold
suddenly falls
over the Devil’s Wharf
filled with several
hungry feral cats
in the basement
near the marble steps
of the jazz club
it’s the beginning
of the month
a begging time,
the drummer says,
even his shoelaces are gone
reminds him the rent
is due,
all his relationships are over
plunges Guy into depression
braying like a lost mule
with a blushing poor
mouth smile
of a once gutsy guy
putting his used Yugo
in reverse,
not believing this night
is all due to his expletives
or from a skeptical oration
from an enriched Beat poet
giving heat from improvisation.
NOW I’M BEAT
All eyes fixed
in the club’s basement
on my soprano sax
I’m beat,
escaping the Eightees
for a Greenwich Village gig
the city rain downpours
on our jazz quartet
to a counter world
of popping corks
zigzagging sounds
will taste a polyphony
of jamming instruments
outside doorways,
my wheels, always late
arriving in a labyrinth
of a recollected song time
with scribbled sheets
of sleep walking papers
in my back pocket
on a borrowed Harley
in the lingering darkness
of a short sleep
I nod off
even with jiving recognition
to the few who arrive early,
the former light weight
and bouncer Gad Maxwell
with stolen boxing gloves
freely given to him
from the local pawn shop,
a young stowaway Tex
always missing in action
from every port of call,
the ex stripper Medea
from Mount Olympus
high school
in a blonde wiglet
between acid trips
from the middle West
to the middle East,
a very shapely New Jersey
pale novelist
without a shelf life,
a young guitarist
in high heels
who sings in Esperanto,
the one time banker
from up town
convicted of money
maddening fraud
now wearing a stolen
Occupy Wall St.tee shirt,
the bummed out actor
who played
Spartacus, in the musical
off off Broadway,
now so painfully tight
in his gym muscle shirt
with his mate ,Ram
the fashionable designer
and part time talk show
host from L.A.
trying to eat us up alive
from old vaudeville jokes
his grandmother taught him
in his crib.
BELLMER’S “THE DOLL”
The patent leather
shoes in a succubus
in a bizarre Boston bar
playing hot jazz at the time
when you met
your friend Ursula
from Berlin
an artist you met
in the ninetees
doing political
for graphics
not the poisoned State
of small minds,
but the surreal
with articulation’s magic
a gorgeous stinging fever
in a chasm of insight
on a double face
of history’s Bellmers doll
purloined by
the fata morgana
which is art.