MORE LOOSE POEMS FROM THE 70s/80s

SAYAT NOVA WINE ADJUSTMENT

Steve rapping about blood pumping,
Choking helping…Little Willie’s Circle.
Cadillac bumpers can’t hit, running,
Slamming past Telegraph Avenue
Parks at 70 MPH.
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(Sayat Nova, 80s)
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CAFÉ RENDEZVOUS

Cigar aroma, revolting sounds of emesis,
Stop outright gay offensive,
Situation develops sideways, embarrassing
Single & double elements
with Post-Prov shift Esteban.
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(Berkeley, 1981)
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SITU PROCESS

Capturing snide remarks
Levelled in questions of
Millenary shaking hostilities,
Cornering varieties of smothered bigness.
Alternative feeling, absorption of
Great intuitive connectivity.
Flower bends to be watered for
Running out of Promethean awareness.
True single centering of loneliness,
Butcher of Ramadan torture.
Capture-hold-slay with cold blood spray.
Nearness of brace curmudgeon, cultivating
Sameness of worthy warmth.
Brother Earl’s Manhattan Transfer jazz,
Nodding, laughing, digging it,
Consciousness of warbling
Air raid siren from previous Earth-
destroying era. Flower overshadowing
Of nighttime Wariness, brace of rapping
A smothery preoccupation
Of altruistic proportions.
Littleness of bravery going all
Walt Dizzy-like in a second,
Split sweater globes calling out loudly,
Obvious to 5th purple Cadillac
That happens by, though.
Big bleating waves of watery gray,
Flowing in a dangerous torrent
Of consumerism, constipating
Immediate danger into little
Shit chunks.
Bother unrelenting cosmos?
Naw! Not for all the juice in Janine’s
Awesome recesses.
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(Berkeley, 80s)
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LA VAL’S PIZZA

Everything except muthafoking
Anchovies, or no peace of understanding
Obtains as the last slice
Passes into gastric oblivion.
Red button penny of
Insightful enlightenment,
For soft dreams of biliousness.
Counts on the jeans through
Melodies of hard-chunking nothingness.
5 years of living song,
The heartbreak of newness,
Soft-edged cut of
Honed endearment.
Fright of cauldiferous twang,
Grittiness of looking at the
Little bones.
Quiet adulation of undergrad
Audience, naïve acceptance of great
Creative forces at work among
The western women present.
Slick, smooth cord changes twang
The strings, drop an octave
Or two
To hammering of steep, thrumming.
Fretted difficulties not at all
Apparent at first
Now vanity, as the beer speaks,
Next week the nerves.
Like Like brown little puckered, winking
Anuses smiling back at you,
Not unlike a bank vault
Slamming shut on certain possibilities.
Lives of dissipation, squandering sentiment
And beingness with privileged confreres,
Sitting with five cervical friends,
Hardly a universe of vertebra, but
Quarrelling over the cosmic emptiness
Of deceitful verisimilitude
That surrounds our august table.
--------------------
(Berkeley, North Side, 80s)
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THAT’S 12 AM BULLSHIT!
(TYPICAL HARTLINE STATEMENT
OF TRUTH)

25 ccs of coolant on the ground,
Candace being chidingly motherly,
Steve fearsome, loud rude statements
Prompted by soft, ungrateful woman
Whining. Berkeley an undergrad
Barren scene of usual riotous gatherings (not!)
Due to summer, other growth callings
And dalliances announced,
Interrupting studying, steadying, sweating
Processes with 2AM hassles of anxiety.
Weird outgoing gay personality nearby
Pink sweater, gold Pulsar watch,
Chatter inane about one-quarter
Actual millions and being able
To purchase choice of lovers,
Steve ready on second such pronouncement
After hazardous pats on nearby ass.
A real brush with death for said gay
Who remains blindly unknowing
Of just how close he comes to
Encountering Aristotelian imperative
Implicit in fist-meets-face,
As his clueless spiritual wandering
Continues. All fear is of death.
Banish fear and conquer death.
|Flower consciousness is only complete
And satisfying when it is in its entirety,
Eternally, entropically entreated!
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(Berkeley, North Side, late at night, 80s)
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OPEN WINDOW ON SOLANO

A door on ambient technology
Lets in fresh breezes
As well as technoid crash
And noisy injustice
To stifle desired universal peace.
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(Solano Avenue, 1980)
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HOW CITY-LIKE

How city-like,
Some senseless beast
Unleashed in primeval glade of
Pressured pleasure.
Predator Pisshead; expectedly the cops
Turn up on cue
With their college degreed bona fides
And plastic Glock 17s.
Unseen wheels intermesh, like
Some cosmic miasmatic machine
on granola bits. Life flow gains early,
Later becoming heavy in life cycle terms.
Why not, sky scrot?
Blue, gray, green
And deathly still shit-browns
Converge.
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(Bay Area, 80s)
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HOW TO DIE SMILING

On motorwheeling lightning,
Through concrete at speeds, beyond belief
Or through ignorance of life-span
Requisite as patience takes a holiday.
Mindless death preferred
To quiet, fearful, waiting awareness.
A mystery that shall never be
Fully revealed until Tock of clock,
Crack of strap,
Wheel of weal,
Blues of bruise,
Flow of blow,
Wave of blue,
Glow of roe,
Fall of all,
Grind of rind,
Stumble of rumble,
Flight of blight,
End of bend,
Roll of droll,
Jar of car,
Pain is plain,
Stoat of tot,
And bed of dread.
And you thought it was hard!
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(Highland Hospital, inspired by Trav’s death, 70s)
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MIDSUMMER CAR PASS

Wheat bleat, sweaty meat,
Sky-fly/dry fly/oh high!
So am I,
Blinding night
To follow blinding light,
Grain rain, bitter feat
As pain diminishes!
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(WTF, Some’eres in the 80s)
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OLD FIAT LOVE SONG

Hidden graceful sweep of line
Slinking mutely, ages of the past,
Caught on street of modern commerce,
So far from Bella Roma,
As if scorned by modern eyes,
Moves the old Fiat,
Wizened herd of four wheel tyres
Dancing lightly over someone’s care
Filled and remorseless past,
Keeping faith with Horn bleats,
Tugging on the heart with
Most unmachine-like persuasiveness.
Child gaze through window
Consumes oil of Innocent combustion,
Easing maintenance
And somewhere far away,
The home garage waits.
Not here. Auto sighs!
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(More WTF, date/time uncertain)
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PROBLEMATIC POETICS

Old new renaissance was tough, man.
Tooth & nail cost was paid,
But actually the gam came through,
Though shit was et and tender ash
Fell from timeless cataclysmic skies
Of ageless arboreal conflict.
Now, resolution to scutt-catching
Breakthrough is the new problem.
How to break through new charismas,
Won by the old poet nightflighters?
Upward firing track of arcing canons,
Tricks of obsolescent poeticism
Suspect, but notwithstanding grin
As quick firing rifling wears smooth
The rusty old steel barrel liners!
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(Another WTF, wine doubtless, 80s)
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SAYAT NOVA DAWN

Old scene, newbrication.
Body sweat, modern etiquette.
Solano moves syrupy slow, down to
Alcatraz Like the tired old sun,
Facing weariness of familiarity
With ceaseless mundane bravery.
Shadows lengthen as do feelings
Of where it’s all going. It is, isn’t it?
Ocean bay tomb of gray, all roads
Lead to home
Which is nowhere near.
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(Sayat Nova, Berkeley, July 1981)
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CRUMB FLY PORTION

Shit man, You know it’s true !
Use your eyes to eat
The pap of unimagined dreams.
Your yap’s unfunctioning yawp
After using acknowledged desultory
Phrases of lifeboat saving
Techniques. The boat still sinks, with
Or without you, so swim or not.
You decide. Either way you died
Mostly before you managed
To crawl through the water
Out of your floating safety sac
Of mangled semantics.
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(Another WTF, Berkeley, 80s)
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SANCTIONED BY NORM

Enemy puppet’s strings
Jerk the same. Social sanction
Smothers all, greedy swallows
Of satiation after
Complete consumption.
Mr. Smart’s new right attire
Conflicts not at all
With workman’s put-on,
Both necks being equally fleshy
And piank, equally caught by end-game
Struggles. Vacuum void scrambling
Instructs to reach a steady rock
In pebbled raging ragged
Midstream passage.
Where are the fish?
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(Berkeley, 80s)
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SAMOYED SAM

Two dog child standoff on
The avenue outside.
Across Lines of hostility
Sight of high & Low levels,
Resourcefully meeting smiles
Through telling glances of witnesses.
Big tail-wag & grinning
Samoyed Sam testifies for
The whole actual humming race,
In matters both canine and not.
After all, who can resist
Big slobbery tongue-licks of
No-strings friendship when proffered,
On the sudden, without demand
(And on, too)? Dogs are like that.
Thank God!
--------------------
(Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue, 70s)
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ESTEEMED DOCTOR SAX

Senior Sax sound deep,
Gray-tailed, scraped barnacles,
Fleeting race from sonic oppressions.
Sing great bleeding pleas
For understanding. Octave registers
Follow Mammon
With warm flowing blooded sounds.
Cries of Injin tribes long forgotten,
Mother sounds of lost scalps for
Forgotten paleface enemies.
Wrenching, pleading, blowing high & clear
While the skies permit it.
All around the humming beans grow
Deaf soon, and music jumps off a cliff.
Kerplunk!
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(Berkeley, The Heidelberg Hofbrau, Telegraph, 80s)
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AZTEC EARLY WARNING

Weird, stormy dawn.
Great Sonoran Desert mists part
To reveal ancients’ empty specters
Of half-imagined geographic substance.
Coyote chuckles as suggestion
That heat lightning
Is about to strike puts
Fear into all who watch the solar
Furnace rising out
Of dry washes with
Antediluvian hyroglyphed warnings
Of portents to all who disregard
Great White Spirit’s undecipherable
Female humor.
Only She knows.
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(WTF, Berkeley 80s)
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HOME TO DIE..IS THAT HERE?
OR TO GO, SIR?

Ground Zero Berkeley.
Telegraph celebration,
Music mesmerisation of notes
In motion, moving, melding
Consonant with mobile moronic
Colonic colonization of
Cerebrally calcified calumny.
Cerebration of celebrations, nonthink
Kneejerk, bispastic actions
Equivalent to cohabitation with
Beyond spirit.
From beyond cauterisations
Of bionic oxyionic foci on
Primordial cacophony,
Onerous, unknowing, disarrhythmic,
Enjoying primary bases
Oenologically enlivening focus.
Portents of drunk reality,
No post-think, adjacent to mindfulness
Blown away on waves of moving,
Fleshed out spasms of people
Or experience reminiscent of memory-
Morbid 70s activity without deeper
Freedom, sensations limited merely
To lasting concomitant euphemisms.
Hipped-out, hypersonorous happenings!
Oh bummer, baby!
Your period...NOW?!
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(Berkeley Be-In, 70s)
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CAFÉ ESPRESSO

Fish, swarming into schools,
Each following unthoughtful reflex,
Being without reaction,
Without reason. Ken unto kin,
Relative only to Relativity.
Thigh popping, lovely looking,
Masticative masturbation.
Mental flossing.
Koi polio,
Ribble-rabble,
Throng crowding
Circumlocution on random
Elemental commiseration
Of watery effluent.
Pretense of collectivity,
Social breeding latent laxity
On reformative juvenility.
Really rents the...you know...
fabric, man!
--------------------------------
(WTF, Berkeley, July 81)
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LIKE A DOG

Like a dog,
Slavers of willing limitlessness,
Whatever attracts the nose
Draws completely.
Compelling commanding senses
To fall into line.
A momentary sensitivity to
Imperial rules. Limited senses,
Limited menses, only
To fall all aquiver on the twist
Of a strange smell, hooked.
The newly created memory of a
Brief sensation passing,
Envelops the organism,
Orgiastically, totally.
Gotta squirt on that!
Gangway!
--------------------------
(WTF Berkeley, July 81, Café Espresso)
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YOUNG FLESH

Like gypsy moth attractions to fiery doom,
The motorwheeled vehicle draws
Unformed, non-congealed textures
Into cloak of identity.
Passing uneasy smiles of new satisfaction
To congregated contracts
With other lost souls.
Easy tidal currents of subtle interest
Flow like breakers on the fictional shoreline
Of the unresting tidal pools of life.
A broken wave is hard to reconstruct!
What the hell...surf’s up!
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(WTF, Café Espresso, July 81)
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PULMONARY CONSTIPATION

Cigarette uncertainty sits tendentiously,
Blowing clouds of knowledge with a
Downcast, knowing look, drinking
The wisdom of books
Far older and more lasting than youth’s
Dizzying, headlong drive towards another
Sea of extinction.
Such the patterns of
Generational growth, like rings on trees,
From the first hint of hurricane force winds
To ultimate monsoonal noctury of human
Self-constructed doom.
Cur of a physician, heel thy soles.
Or at least
Get me a spiritual band-aid.
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(WTF, July 86, Berkeley)
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BIG SUR BACKTRACK

Night driven rush from East Bay
Fiery friday hospital headaches lands
Bbuffoon and bosom-babe in primeval
Forest mountaintop, botched-up gap,
Where shoes fitting badly force large
Embarrassment to surface
As halfway to Little Sur River
Blisters rise, causing secret relief
Of not having to complete trek
With back-blasting Bergans rucksack on
hot day to Jackson Camp.
Oh, the humanity!
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(Little Sur River, 80s)
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PASSING REMARQUE

Nepenthe parking lot, raging surf below,
Replete with Ferraris and Porsche sportscar
Coffin-capsules basks in reflected sun
Like Lone Ranger silver bullets
Frozen half-way barrel-leap-wise
On suspended tongue of flame.
Imagined laughs of sideway,
Self-indulgent false security span
The leafy canons
As youthful narcissism
Demands and plays
To a full nature’s nuthouse.
Hi-yo Silver!
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(Big Sur, Esalon Institute, 80s)
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SHIVER LEAVES, FOG DUST

Big feather fog leaves
Shake in sodden waves
Like clusters of forgetful gas.
The Little Sur River sundown swoops
Lower to take a dunk In the vast blue
Pacific. Earlier two panties found flung
Aside along trail. Good nookie
Or bad karma? Denoting ‘who-cares’
Hallmark of free from constraints early
August ocean escape.
Assemble with wine and cheerfully
Live forever smell of dinner downwind
Beans after poetry hors de’ouvre.
Eat this poem instead of beans
And live forever.
Sundown on the Sur
Or sunrise elsewhen, as fall fog flows,
Flinging flux ferociously.
Besides, your ass shines brighter
Than the sun, anyway!
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(Big Sur, 80s)
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SAMBOS PANCOOKS, CARMEL

Spastic conjugal stacks
Of wheat cakes go flying, madly,
Predictably into metabolic Hades.
Devil foods, but oh so transcendent!
I’d rather have waffles!
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(WTF, Big Sur, 80s)
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BRYONIC CLAP

Myopic mind thrusts of Irish-German profusion
Bely the subtle super-filage.
After a certain point
The flaps are normally retracted, V2 is reached,
Committed to either up or down but
Never sideways. 158 degrees out…180 reached.
The yoke is pulled back, the alarm sounds,
The frame shudders as black catastrophe
Hangs in the balance. 50 feet between
Oblivion or the boundless blue (above).
The decisive crux is so miniscule,
So strained and so insignificant to
The Universe, which watches
Impersonally with jaundiced regard.
Throttles forward the big silver bird
Strains up into the void.
While sitting safely, so assumed, in
The belly of the beast, 150 souls live
The life of ordinary passage.
Groans, gaseous biliousness, protests of
Ingested Human fuel,
So far from the looming endpoint
That never happens...surely?
So safe, until the moment ‘pon which hangs
Oblivious eternity occurs. 5 seconds pass
And span lifetimes till the expansive
Crunch of explosive orgasmic disaster
Is heard from horizon to horizon.
But only among the initiates.
PSA 280 has been committed
To the archives of journalistic
Sensation, forever.
Live at Five…..or is that fair?
Microfiche 522616; check it yourself.
But include a stamped, self addressed Envelope.
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(SFO on a dark & stormy night, 80s)
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SATURDAY PM FOG

Frog fog, high sky belies
High sky fly, south sighs.
See ski, we flee wee skrees,
Mountain scree, flee the knee
Or even believe!
See me reprieve belief, beneath
The heath, Irish I were not so,
Slow & blow until the glow
Of that below claims truth
As its very own. ‘Struth!
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(Shannon Airport, 80s)
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HIS LORDSHIPS, BERKELEY

Beneath the low below
Neither Plover nor albatross.
The Black bros stalk their prey,
Near the fire, nervous glances,
no charge.
It is not CAVU!
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(Date unknown, Berkeley marina)
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DEATH IS THE BEST REST

Death is the end, my friend.
Bend the end,
But breath is also death,
Deferred and blessed.
Rest is best to fend off death,
But death put off is rife
With life, a strife that ends with loss
Of breath and from there death.
No less. No breaks.
And definitely no extra innings allowed.
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(WTF, date unknown)
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CHILD WILD

Young, unsung, to grow no mo,
Not so slow, though, life strife,
Rife with Life! Grow, ho!
Slow no mo! Grown recall,
moan and stall,
Ironic bones of life’s loans are
Typically called back for celestial interest
At the lowest possible rates!
--------------------------
(WTF, date unknown)
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