The dead birds fell without anyone
having seen them fly or being able
to imagine from where. They were black,
their eyes were closed, and no one
knew what kind of birds they were. But everyone
seized them and looked
up, at the recently and longly
infused sky.
—San Francisco and other poetic dreams | Edited by Don Brennan.
San Francisco and other poetic dreams is made possible by Writers workshop 146 Leavenworth St. San Francisco CA. Edited by Don Brennan. Program Director at jennywileysf@hotmail.com, or drop by the Community Arts Studio.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. William S. Burroughs.
You strut in with gang signs in your eyes,
I arrive with books under my arms.
You have lived on the streets where
the cry of your mother has become broken glass,
your stepfather's belt buckle a scar on the edge of your eye,
his fist a split bone in your nose.
We sit in a room
until we find a story we can share...
—Addi, a poem by Rennon Mariano
Addi Why?
Why do you disturb my sleep?
Oh Addi sometimes I feel you take my will.
I am helpless. Addi, Hell-ples, Help-less:…..HELP
My knees they are not there today, they were yesterday
You take my thoughts, my mind, my hope my tomorrow Addi
They say Addi
Child tasted that yesterday.
—To the sea, a poem by Silvina Faure.
I marvel at the sea for, in its vastness,
It neither takes a rest, nor sleeps.
Beneath the apparent surface of fake calmness
There is much more than what our eyes can see.
I am seized by the enchantment of the waves
When gentle rollers sweetly wash the shores,
Or when powerful breakers toss the vessels...
—From Iceland: «Genocide», a poem by Hrafn Andres Harðarson.
I see a young man
with hopeful dreams in his eyes,
and love -
I see a young woman
with love in her eyes, and hopes
and dreams...
I see a yellow star, a blue
uniform,
in the snow
in the freezing, white snow.
I see young men standing in line
in fine uniforms...
—Collected Poems by Rennon Mariano | Tenderloin - San Francisco.
John—–Gloves on, Scarff to the wind, Jacket snugg,
I feel the power, I am that POWER!!!! And where is precision, by golly I be that PRECISION; and now I have
become the SPEED, (floors the accelerator) Ladies and gents
we’re two seconds from taking off from the ground.(Suddenly. looking to the side, a young woman is sitting next to him) Whoahhh….Who the hell are you?
V—-You don’t want to know...
—Selected Poems of Francisco Álvarez Koki.
I won’t be able to move by fear
Of burning the rugs.
—José Lezama Lima
High on the wall
And from a distance,
From the Cubist canvas
A few eyes like ears heard us.
The daring artist may
Question the painting later on,
What with all of our panting and juggling.
And yet the painting,
True to the art that our bodies are,
Shall remain quiet and smiling
With the still steaming tinkling of your kisses...
“I hope you don’t think I’m a hippie,” said the man to whom I was talking in the Crown Room of the Stardust Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I’m just kind of, you know, growing this beard.” His name tag said Skip Skivington. He was probably in his early forties and he had been at Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division in 1944 and his voice was gentle and apologetic and I had not thought him a hippie.
It was the first evening of the 101st Airborne Association’s twenty-third annual reunion, one weekend in Las Vegas not long ago. Outside the late-summer sky burned all day and all night and inside it was perpetually cold and carpeted and no perceptible time of day or night, and here, in the Crown Room of the Stardust, along with a great many wives and a few children, were a couple of hundred survivors of Normandy, Bastogne, the Battle of the Bulge.
—With the index finger of a tear | Wafi Salih.
Tell me, what battle
lacks on the entrails
without a God of insanity?
Drunken
suns
of night
Lead
to other hell
the hell
Life
you come from living
so far
Cracking
the chest of light
with nobody.
—San Francisco and other poetic dreams | Juan Carlos Vásquez.
After I Jumping,
I May regret and wish to return to the platform,
Too late Falling, F a l l i n g.
After falling, A whip splits my spine,
all that I was in life is but a silhouette marked
by a chalk outline.
And what if I shot myself ?
The Index in its depth
feeling all the weight,
these spasms like dread discharges
to turn out the light, a night of brains blown out.
The infant asleep in the trough is a Buddhist.
This time of year is very, very old. Over eggs,
that is all we can conclude, us who are asleep,
who are dreaming this long dream.
What if this infant could be awoken?
There is someone in heaven who for centuries
an infinite number of centuries, has been
perfecting himself. Is he here now with us,
watching for a red globe to roll off the tree into
wretchedness?
The way his high voice would break and break down,
Beautifully lonesome, lost . . . who once wrote
A song at gunpoint in a hotel downtown,
Fingers shaking to hold the simple chords.
The world was one long night, endless Nashvilles,
A jambalaya of women, whiskey, and pills.
At the Opry they poured coffee down his throat
Backstage before the show, until he’d cough
And rise, trying to remember his own words.
Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:
the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.
I would restore
the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulchre
under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and by-roads
purring family cars
nose into line,
the whole country tunes
to the muffled drumming
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