Sections

we’re mourning in Amerika yet,
art is everywhere

Gaugin once declared, “ All art is either plagiarism, or revolution”
I admit it. I’m guilty. of both, tho
I hopefully choose the latter,
and you? you choose. Today, to live your original life
or be a plagiarized television Amazonian techno reproduction you see…

Gil Scott Heron told us the revolution will not be televised do you? Own one?
I don’t I’m powerless againt ADD tv for me tv is death
by a thousand ads
its well I don’t know if its the ADD or is it easy otherwise to gove it up walk away turn away
wait, yeah it is easy once you slip into that no space there is no
other choice no going back you see.. for me

art is everywhere

Pollack splatters anarchy across the suburban 50’s deathscape I found
one of his pieces naturally created on the back of the men’s room door
at cup a joes someone said
they saw a racoon in it
Billy Pilgrim flies thru time knowing
his future his death as Refaat Alareer declares “we. are. Here.” gently, quietly.
Knowing too his death is coming we all know our death is coming
the question is
do we face it? embrace it
or run from it
that is the question
is it not?
that was me shouting thru tears as he Refaat declared his Gaza brothers
to be or not to be
and was bombed into smithereens for it his
organs splattering a bright white kite on its way
his way, to heaven but still his words do not disappear it is what and why what
we do this strange thing tilting at literary windmills this pointing out
blood soaked road signs along the way for others to notice we. re here you see

Art Is.

Art is.. everywhere.

Even while Lady Liberty mother sister brother here
we all know she was once Free or was she?
Did we get it wrong?
We tried and failed attempting correction thru amendment a band aid or the answer?
others admired us but now?
They avoid us like the police jacketed plague we are
embargoed
we are a travel advisory nation a pariah from freedom
our gift from France her battered child democracy struggling under the weight of a
thousand fascistic saber cuts,

a madman who cant dance a cinematic Tarantinoesque disembowelment of her
democratic virtues she stands and fights millions strong
a bright spring morn
young and old gather black white and brown yelling screaming anger spilling a 1000 signs
declare
“you fuck ! You pathetic excuse for humanity you madman this will not stand ! “

You know my parents were blacklisted working at the UN by McCarthy in the late 50’s
my mom was fired for first reporting about pollution on the Cuyahoga by Republic Steel
in the early 60’s I was protesting at 14 in the early 70s’,lived on lived communaly into the
early 8o’s pursued music and solar energy into the 90’s.. the 2000’s the teens
does anything ever change ?I’m tired I just want to dance create joy buy old lp’s
But democracy she resists the plight, grievously wounded as any true battle scarred warrior is
as my mother was as your mother heart is now today…for you see

I was a proxy for Muslims for democracy
last month for palestine to be free
just days out of surgery I’ve been bleeding for days ladies I think I’m begnning to understand
you just a little tho they tell me its okay the bleeding for days art
is everywhere
blood splattered on the back door of the mens room
down my leg
in the streets
art is everywhere.

is it not in these times we come to know our true mettle? not in the breezy summers at the beach our minds tarred and feathered with fear the mental lynching become real others
dragged away are we next ? Thrown in the kettle yes we are no wait !
hold the breach ! this is not a disney land beach
we all wish to escape to chasing seashells mouse ears innocence be buried in waves laughing in the sand
including me
instead
Faces smeared scarred scared bludgeoned and blackened let me tell you people this is revolution again and again
not on CNN no though Al Jazeera gets pretty damn close …Art is everywhere
I speak of my family’s Buchenwald. concentration camps?
they’ve moved them to El Salvador

Art Toleno knows…Ina Carino knows, Alan Smith knows, Anita and Anna know Rick Klaus Thies he knows and shouts it from the podium
Art is everywhere and yes I’m guilty of plagiarism
I will gladly imitate style create my own substance
is not imitation the greatest flattery ? Yes. but is that what we want flattery? No.
originality I apologize Art you master the mystery for me Ina you welcome me Anita, Alan you stand up you honor others Anna you honor us all. Debbie are you here your kind heart your selfless relentless self.Klaus shouts it from the podium fearless
Art is everywhere.

yet

The 4th of July is cancelled in Angel Town. I’m speechless
angry a helping hand, a kind word amidst the vile poison spilled on them children playing in the park thugs on horseback I remember that same thing in 1970 an alley in Cleveland /Vietnam 4 police mounted 4 abreast charging someone grabbed me saved me for another day yet
the innocent among us didn’t get away did they who is next? You? You? Yes. You. And you

A warm meal shared art is everywhere my heart swells with pride as those who fight back are gassed even as July 4th is cancelled in Angel Town art, is everywhere

I find art in refuse washed down gutters swollen with rage remnants speak to me
discarded abandoned a dead squirrel roadkill as I once was I gently cradle gentle her and bury her sending her traumatized soul to a heaven where nuts are plentiful and cars do not crush her I don’t revel in the mystery i get my hands dirty
tho
I do admire its dark symmetry
a flattened can a rusted bandolier of nails on a job site abandoned from a nail gun the hammering in the screams echo in my mind by a man named heyzus was this jesus’ crucifixtion his nails his pain our sins our pain today? me? we gather them up in buses the hey zeuses and morales and send them back guilty of working me a jew asking this?
You know what I’m really really pissed

off
Art is everywhere sometimes its horror
sometimes beauty sometimes both.

I embrace desolation
as I once did on a mountain top a lonely traumatized teen and now found art blooms in the hearts of friends sharing love carrying me to ER again and again while we argue who is right and who is wrong art is everywhere I find
rusted metals faded plastics they, a visual gong for me bottle caps and empty broken glass a twig that reminds me of Groot. “Groot!”
I stumble in pain injured a hand reaches out helps me up love blooms amongst concrete life pushes thru the cracks of our fragile humanity art is everywhere I need to tell you before I go long ago on Wisconsin Avenue above Georgetwon riding in an AMC Pacer that auto spaceship I’m an addict/entrepeneur snorting coke and thinking trying on good thoughts amidst the refuse of my mind, about solar energy and my self thievery I..
came out of my body an old weathered hand reaches down a sunflower bloomed it spreads its seeds around the world instantaneously and changed me changed us changed everything changed you you are that seed you see my friend
sunflower is coming I know not when but in the meantime my friends
plant the seeds
art..is everywhere oh

and

come and see me some time I live on dare st literally you’ll know it when you see it when you see art you know it the old red and green Volvo’s around town covered with stickers literally I love that word literally held together with colorful duct tape the Palestinian flag I finally had the courage to fly while my Ukraine flag is repaired it was tattered by war grown moldy with old wounds art

is everywhere my door is open my heart is open to you my friend remember

we only have today and

art is everywhere

27 dead.
An entire family of 14.
“They were a threat”.
To what?
They didn’t die fast enough?

Lies, Lies the daily horror, numb with rage these
are not Jews embracing “ All lives are precious” this
is madness as
Buchenwald and Auschwitz echoes in my heart
where do I start ?
helpless gripped with fear Refaat taught me
my pen is my sword I slay mass murder with words truly it is
not enough the best I can do yet
I carry the flag Red, Black White and Green
looking over my shoulder now the Zionist stormtroopers coming for me too
the spilled Red blood of children shot in the head
the Blackness darkness of their death
the Whites as their souls
rise to heaven like his kites and Green I cling to for hope
while we weep.
Shalom? Peace ?
where are you tonight?

As I mowed my lawn with nuclear power

bemoaning the fate of Mariupol,

helpless in the

onslaught our insanity our

inhumanity to humanity this ( Eminem? Anyone?) inadequate

rhyming inanities as

Young kids walk by hand in hand dressed up for Jesus

celebrating his chocolate dipped pagan rebirth in

Jesse’s Helm’s church

just down the road.

I’m grateful to their White supremacy financing the space where my

AA meeting met, though not associated in any way.

So, as I mowed my lawn with nuclear power it is it turns out,

contrary to everything and I mean everything else that’s happening

all around me ,

it is still

a beautiful day

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

World renowned Gaza poet Refaat Alareer was, along with his brother, nephew, sister and 3 nieces

killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6th.

I learned of his death on the 9th, started writing and crying on the 10th and wrote this piece on the 11th.

 

They say he was my enemy

he was a poet and Palestinian

but I am a poet too, and a Jew.

More than any rabid Zionist he

was my brother as only a few can truly be I

wept for days though until now he was someone I barely knew.

For him his sword was a pen,
his voice a military barrage breaking through the walls of denial his
land mines his mind exploding our preconceptions

his bomb,
was his heart.

Full of to bursting with love and kindness and for this

they killed him murdered him and his family too

because truth is the most powerful weapon of all

again if I only knew you Refaat

I had to learn to even pronounce your name and now

I am enrolled.

Committed to this discipline you outlined and grew

Yet he asked of all of us in his final poem just before, that
when he died, as he did just last week
to tell his tale
to tell ours too to let our voices never stop

to teach others young and old that their story their voice is paramount to evolution and though the revolution will not be televised
the genocide is on Al Jazeera all the time.

You see when others witness the truth there is no way they can condone this

suicide of our hearts and minds to continue
yet

how do we heal all those shattered dreams the Kristallnacht of
todays banner headline
“More are killed and more to come, MORE! MORE!“
it seems it will never end isn’t that
the worst nightmare of all?

Isn’t this what they want our enemies of hate and fear
for both the traumatized for a thousand years
Jewish hearts as so many of my friends are, full to the brim how
do we turn this denial into hope? This trauma into a way to cope

first,

we must weep and grieve all the losses we could not keep the bloody visions that keep us from sleep from being destroyed, on both sides this nightmare seeps
you see

Refaat was a threat.

To violence he was a threat to indignity he was a threat to
ignorance a firestorm burning away misunderstanding he was a threat to genocidal destruction raining 2000 pound bombs all down around him he would not leave his home in Northern Gaza his last stand until the very end
even in fear of being killed knowing
he was a Power Target a “terrorist” marked for assassination a
threat to the inherent corruption of intolerance that surely came for him he
spoke up he

reached out

and though his heart no longer beats even though
we do not hear his kind and gentle voice appealing to us all around the world we hear you Refaat we see you Refaat we embrace you we
carry you
your voice we …. I weep.
for you for us I….weep I cannot seem to stop.

But I

share your story the poets story the philosopher story the professor of your young men the activist teacher of English lit and it is ours now
as you taught us so kindly so quietly so
patiently it burst through a claxon of clarity
and the bombs came closer

to do our part to shout our story out because
as long as one voice is left Refaat you told us
as long as a poet is still writing as long as one professor is still standing teaching as long as one mother brother father sister is loving
one doctor and nurse are healing …. Refaat,

we have won.

In loving Honor and Memory Refaat Alareer

born September 23, 1979, Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, Gaza Strip

murdered December 6, 2023 Northern Gaza

age 44 survived by his wife Nusbaya and friends.

His brother, brother’s son, sister and her 3 children were killed in the bombing

Poetry has been an integral part of my life for almost 40 years.

In my writing through and about my recovery from abuse, abandonment, addiction and trauma.

From my awakening as a creative when my biological family dismissed me as a teenage crazy, delinquent black sheep.

And, as a child and grandchild of Holocaust Survivors and a Repatriated ( Dual US)

German Jew, our / their and my experience informs me as a Secular Anti Zionist

and a supporter of a Free Palestine.

As does my opposition to Germany’s support of Israel at the ICJ and

what I call “Blue List” suppression of Palestinians in Germany, as well as here at home.

But most important for me, when Higher Power, that I experience as Love and Light

flows through me through the words transcribed onto the page,

I feel grateful to be a poet. You see

I have lived through words that hurt.

Words can kill as they did for Refaat Alareer.

And words can heal and change the world as they have done from

the example of Refaat Alareer and all of us.

Peace in Palestine

Bobby

aka

Robert Gilbert Goldsmith

There are always a few things I’ll remember about war

A cold winter night, Vermont

around ‘72

piles of snow slide off the roof

with a roar

and

back into my warm covered slumber I go

only to be awakened by shouting and my dad

lifting me out of bed

mumbling wide eyed

carrying me downstairs

sweat pouring off his body

to the living room

where my brother and step mother stood

cold feet on a wooden floor

and my dad screaming

“JUMP ! “ JUMP “ !

and is off to rescue others from a plane on fire in his mind

from a war gone for over 3 decades before

I’ll always remember those few things about war.

 

We love you Dad

rest in peace.

 

 

As the child and grandchild of Holocaust Survivors and a (Dual US) German citizen under Jewish Repatriation Basic Law 116

I am for a Free Palestine and for a truly democratic Israel, which currently doesn’t exist.

Shalom Aleichem

Bobby

The remark was tossed off  as casually as the ash

from her ever present Salem menthol’s,

“I almost committed suicide once“, she said,

“ when I was a teenager ”.

Coming off her exhale didn’t lessen the mind numbing shock

that stopped me in my tracks. After all

she was my mother.

“The subject”, or any part of it, and what lead to it

was never broached before that day in the early ’90’s.

We were  both sober by then. Painfully so.

Max, her father, had been incarcerated in the Buchenwald forced labor camp

not once,

but twice, in 1938.

Still they got out.

They were wealthy.

Max was a Wurstmacher.

Owned a sausage factory,

had even been a Kaiser guard.

Those sausages?  You laugh? Go on,  laugh.

They saved our life.’

Grandmutter frantically searched for an exit for them and found one via

a bribed American official in Vienna.

Mein Grandmutter Betty? She paid him $10,000 in gold.    In 1938.

This allowed Max exit out of Buchenwald and the whole family’s

placement on that precious list, they left in late ’38,

right before the door slammed shut.

Unspoken all these decades, it effected mom, them, all of us

like a toxic underground waste stream flowing though our family

what seems like forever.

Until now.

I still remember my first comprehension of the Final Solution, I was, maybe 8 or 9.

We were at my grandparents beautiful apartment overlooking Lake Erie.

Max was dying of cancer and got sick during our visit so

I was shuffled off to the study, plopped in front of the television and left alone

while more immediate life and death issues were being attended to.

There was a PBS piece on the Camps on TV and suddenly,

I realized for the first time,

they were talking about us.

They were talking about me.

Jump forward,  2013.

Mom has died, except the memories, good and bad.

May she find peace beyond measure.

And now I, am a (dual US and) newly repatriated German citizen.

I had learned  of  my rights to German citizenship under Jewish Repatriation laws

and even though mom had avoided any interest  in pursuing  reparations I wanted this.

It didn’t end well for us, Mom & I,  I’m sorry to report.

This isn’t one of those , ( what I call ),  “happy Holocaust Survivor” stories where we overcame all our experiences and trauma’s and marched on into the sunshine, loving all, smiling and laughing. No.

More like the ongoing grey days in Cleveland, and Berlin, where sunshine is the anomaly, we trudged along.

Ingrid and I weren’t talking up until the day she died.

This wasn’t my idea, and frankly, the guilt was almost overwhelming.

I say almost because at least I was under the care of a therapist and psychiatrist, medication and even some volunteers and working a recovery program every day.

But now I had learned of Basic Law 116 that gives survivors of the Holocaust

and their direct descendants German citizenship.

“Really”, you ask?

Yes I wanted it.

Absolutely.

I did the research, and with the help of a survivor repatriation specialist, applied, and got it.

And so my wife and I visit Berlin, for the first time in 2013, and

this piece, their, our story came roiling out the first morning

of my first day in Germany,

as a newly repatriated German citizen.

An American Jew returning to Germany,  oddly, to feel safe.  To find my home.

This is my families true story.

A postcard from Buchenwald.

( May 23rd 2013 1.22 pm to 2.43 pm Berlin)

 

Ein Deutsch Post aus Buchenwald?

I….

shattered.

Nights cling

Crystallized hearts clutch a

cold fuzzy bedraggled little bear her

pavement splattered innocence frozen

 

“Sanctuary?   anyone?

 I beg you please, my family..

Please.. Anyone?“

Appeals unanswered bells

never tolled,

“We have gold. “

Now they listen.

We run we hide we pray we lie our

hearts decades frozen now plow through the

snow drift piled denial,

another Cleveland winter as

icycled hearts

“… Snap! “

74 years

SEVENTY FOUR YEARS…

” Snap!”   Like that …

The clouds parted fields come into view fields of Green fields of… Energievent?

Fields of …windmills? I can’t believe g** en himmel  my

very first view is energievent?

The windmills whisper
“we were awaiting your return”

smiling nodding their

long white jiggly arms

gently cradle healing breezes …

the little red book clutched his bedraggled bear

“My first time nein sprechin ze Deutsch, ein Amercanser”  he

smiles and shakes his head at me

taps the little red passbook as if to say

 “You? Are German? “

Shakes his head again unbelieving stamps me in

I smile and move on

I don’t care

I AM HERE NOW

my wife scolds him she DOES care SHE follows and scolds him

I DON’T CARE I am HOME now

Home now.

Home?

“I’ve never been here I tell you” home?  “yes home yes

you have been here yes home yes they whisper the clouds whisper the green fields whisper the silenced stacks whisper the trains whisper yes the curry vurst doesn’t whisper it shouts “Yes! you have.”  yes welcoming  leaving crystallized hearts  melting   here  join us  yes  leave your uber freedoms  now  slavish  yes leave the gorging that leaves you ever hungry still yes leave the  hearts carcasses yes leave the  sleep that doesn’t sleep  yes  you are here home now yes.”

“but I have never been here I tell you”

“yes YOU HAVE yes”  the energievent says “yes you have yes” the fuzzy bear the wet and bedraggled bear smiling button eyes winking says “yes you have yes she has they have you have we have yes it is as it should be yes but you, you yes you the Americanser  “Bob”, the German man child’s heart orphaned generations ago yes it is not always as it should be no and yes their hearts and homes were plundered again and again yes we are still this wounding yes now opened bleeding seeping some yes yes we chased you yes we are just now getting to you yes we now know you yes we will bury them together these ghosts”,

yes” our inner Yoda tells us,

“There is no trying “

“yes “

Our inner alcoholic says

“yes there is no crying”

“Yes “our inner child says,

“There is no lying

from our tortured selves”

“Yes, they followed you yes, they chased you down yes. these zombies stilled yes, there is a fire here warm your hands yes, let us incinerate these zombies you and I yes,  let us fill our hearts carcasses yes, let us warm our frozen hearts together melt them into energievent into windmills nein, there is no cold metal now clanging shut nein, there are no oven bricks and mortar no badges of shame that are honor no badges of honor that were shame NOW with us yes, no,  no rooms of shivering outcasts to die horribly yes, now join us now in life now yes,

come  back here to now with us yes, your steamer trunks of memory and pain we are welcoming unload them  yes, you can., unload and  empty them yes, here, the  tattooed numbers on their arms yes,  we remember them too the ladies @ the bakery smiling and pinching you sneaking  you a Rugelach you seeing the numbers tattooed on their jiggly arms yes,  and no one talking of it the numbers yes, let them  float away those numbers  yes,  those  emptied steamer trunks down the rivers yes, to rest and sleep yes , scatter the ashes the  frozen, discarded yes, and yes  there is  just this battered cup now this prayer  cup this Kiddish cup this heart  cup this  tear cup yes, that all that’s  left yes  THATS ALL THATS LEFT OF THEM  YES, just this battered cup  YOU brought this back you brought them back this battered  cup I carry

“Raise your glasses now “

raise your hearts now yes,

raise our hearts now yes we can yes you can  yes to this door open  gently gently yes,

it is okay to yes this yes  to bury the Final Answer yes,

yes to open the  wound and let it bleed and seep and  crust and  stain and heal  and scar and fade away then yes,  the scars will fade yes this door  this  card this battered cup these  fields this  dream this wind yes, this  little red book yes it is a healing yes they are here with you yes,

proud  ever  proud the Kaiser guard the sausage  maker the writer  muther grandmother ENVIRONMENTALIST MUTHER proud so proud yes, at your return yes,

heal her HEALER yes heals you yes, heal us heals them yes heals her yes,

their scattered scarred crippled battered frozen  burnt smothered  souls lift on windmills  on energievent on  yes we can change now the energy  forever yes,

they are wind yes they are  green fields  yes  they are  water they are ocean they are waves they are  here  now yes let them awaken now and let them  rest.  Yes …

   SNAP! “

The doorbell rings 

A letter plops on the floor..

A little girls heart clutching her bedraggled bear her hand clutching a bottle of poison, lye ….

“ein postkarte? aus Buchenwald?”

Unbelieving drops the lye bottle shatters now on the kitchen floor the poison seeping spreading but not in her now not her heart stopped already shattered yes her death wish yes shatters it stays quietly lurking a cancer on her heart decades gone yet she says again unbelieving

 “Ein postkarte aus BUCHENWALD?”

it says…

“mien liebchin I am fine.

 I’ll be home soon

wait for me

 mein goldsach

Wait for me.

I WILL BE HOME SOON I

PROMISE YOU I WILL.” 

I ask you how can a father promise this from a death camp?

Send a postcard from a camp of no exit I ask you this impossibility to arrive moments before she drinks the lye she would have drunk the lie that lie that is you are alone you are abandoned worthless less than nothing

Yet, he can.

Yet, he did.

I am here to prove it to you this day this

small well, not so small miracle.

Her heart swells again her hope swells again she smiles now …

  “…SNAP!”

Puffing her ever present Salem menthol’s

I am frozen to this spot that day long ago,

she says,

“Oh, I never told you that?

 How I almost killed myself then? “

“If it weren’t for the postcard arriving from Buchenwald…

puff …. puff….

“Oh.   Sorry. I thought I  told you that . “

My face painted ghost white with shock,

“No mom, you never told me that.”

……

yes you, I, we wouldn’t be here standing crying frozen battered now here now, she is gone too now but these she is with me she was  there her arms the windmills  welcomin  my environmental muther she

her memories of those moments now hardened into oven bricks grown cold now warmed by the healing the energievent yes I have her here now yes you are here now yes you I

have brought this battered cup home this prayer cup this cup of tears this

Kiddish cup yes now.

Yes.

Now.

You are home. Now yes. Now

I am home.  Yes.   Now.

We are home.

 

 

 

 

And to my neighbor Roy Lowry from Arlington Va

an exceptional gentlemen and gardener

who told me this story one day

as we stood in the sunshine watching Butterflies

 

“Butterflies  Dance”

 

What a spectacular Azure summer day

the sky so blue I could drink it the field

a three day beard of stubbled yellow stalks

pointing forlornly to the sky

from our hidden vantage these crippled giants these

desperate Redwoods stand

abandoned

stripped, of their jewels…. and Poppies blazing red a

herd of them poking awkward, ridiculous bobbing waving

in the breeze ah Anzio, Anzio what a georgous day

but when the artillery hit the barrage blew a hole open so wide the

field stubble came pouring in and

as I scrabbled for a foothold the ground,  liquid under me my  hands

finding perch

something solid… a shinbone? I….

all  around me the  Poppies lay scattered and  dying.

Later, silently smoking my last precious  Camel I watched a German P.O.W.

(  9 feet tall and  strong as an ox ), marching back and forth yelling and

grabbing other  tired, wasted  volunteers he begged us for our

poncho’s

to use as stretchers to haul out the wounded later that day they

put him in a prison cage and the  truck  drove away I…

never saw  him again but

I was witness, he was a hero that  day.

I dig flowers now,  in my garden out back the

radio plays over  terraces of  Impatiens, Vinkas, Roses  &  Mums as I

rail against  the Republicans  laying waste to everything that lies  in their path

but on this late summers day

with the sky as blue as  an Azure  soda I

watch the  butterflies dance,

one yellow,

one black

and go back to my garden

where  no Poppies grow,

or ever have or,  ever will.

The story of Passover is the story

of an oppressed people

overcoming the terror of a violent imperialist ruler.

Today that Pharoah is Netanyahu and his IDF

and settler bullies and the oppressed are the

Palestinians wishing for peace from the

river to the sea where they too have lived

for a thousand years.

I support the Columbia non violent

Students for Justice in Palestine 100%,

And read at an SJP open event here on Friday

Zionism is not Judaism
And
Anti zionism is not anti semiticism.

We are complicit in the marking of

homes and spilling of blood with

Israeli AI assasination software

killing tens of thousands of Gaza women

and children while Israeli settlers commit daily

atrocities in the West Bank.

This is genocide perpetrated by descendants

of a former Holocaust.

A horror almost to insane to imagine its real.

It must end.

Now.

Robert Gilbert Goldsmith
Child and Grandchild of Survivors

 

he was happy then that day he

 

wanted us to be men salt stench

soaked his woolly worn flannel shirt my

 

tractor fender seat near him a

mad bouncing metal trampoline no

place I’d rather be.

 

“Here” he says, getting up gesturing me

to the wheel,

 

“You drive.”   A

gap toothed surprise all my

cousins jealously raging tossing hay bales now

 

“Me?! I… I…”

I settle in he

demonstrates the shift

slowly, slowly

up & down the rows king of

 

the road now

all 5 miles per hour hauling our

 

hay load bales stacked ladder high summer air

our hair all bristling hayseed full his

 

smiling satisfaction slaying dragons my heart

palpating sweat drenched dripping he

 

doesn’t wipe it off I

loved him for that chugs

his magical silver thermos eminent

 

satisfaction spreading through him stops,

hands it to me, “Want some?”

 

tasting it tentative, driving,

one handed up hill a

cold shake electric shock his

 

eyes crinkling with delight at my

awakening caffeinated astonishment we

shared iced coffee he was

happy that day we

were men.

My high school fell into the

ocean today it was

a beautiful, tragic sight.

 

All around me life teamed

in the airport intent

on their way to family and

 

expectant happiness

 

but in my mind California collapsed

                 in a Pacific roil my

school perched

on a mountaintop my

crew ensconced in the

cradle of

an ancient Redwood spotted

whales calling

                        spouting their joy

                                                      miles away.

 

All gone now.

                        The houses we built, empty.

 

Yet the memories of my sweetheart a

blonde Lady Godiva riding naked astride her

favorite Palomino her

glittering smile etched on my mind her halo

golden sunshine now

                                    old and Grey she

runs a bakery in Eugene and is married,

                                                                    not to me.

 

Or Joshua my strong valiant friend muscled blonde

son of a movie star but then it was California and

everyone was.

 

Picking me up at the airport senior year after

Dad locked me in the house and yelled at me off and on for 3 days

what a worthless fool I was Josh..

rescued me, pouring me into his rebuilt Ford.

Above Jenner

on our way up Hauser Bridge Road the Pacific crush a

stones throw away

the transmission stuck

we rode

up that mountain road

the last 10 miles

in the fog,

backwards,

slowly, very slowly Josh

never flinched smiling

 

patting me on the back bore

what was left of me

to school.

It took

all night.

                 I guess I needed the time.

 

We were

a small family then, 50 or so

eventually we all moved on no

 

football or proms for us

we dug clams at the shore snuck into

resorts for showers ate

like mountain men our

innocence melting around us we

 

adventured we

slopped hogs we

built monuments

to our folly

                      still standing.

 

In our minds even as our dreams collapsed

absorbed by a turbulent ocean a

relic of this violent coast we

 

moved on. I

lost my heart there I

found love there I

was safe I

was safe I

 

was loved.

 

But the earth rumbles and we

fall into its cracks

 

all our visions compost for future generations

that rise among us                

 not knowing we were even here for

some day soon we too will fall into that ocean

 

eventually it seems we all do.

There she is, waiting.

An open door to her frozen luxury and,

I want her.         My mother is ice cream.

 

reaching into the

frozen recess of her

silent womb I

grasp her, smiling, she is, ice cream

cradling her

soft

smooth

Cold

creamy I…..hold her my

Mother is ice cream I…

spooning her into my

suckling the pure sweet she

loves me my

Mother is ice cream my

 

novel is violence

my mother is ice cream i

hold her she, holds me the

bowl rocking loving in my arms I…

clutching the happiness the

sweetness contains me I’m

frozen. warm.

 

Empty now,

dropping the container to the floor

settling back the

TV talks to me teaches whispers cajoles and embalms me

 

bathed

in the blue light i

die slowly

waiting…

My mother is ice cream.

( inspired by the Denzel Washington movie “Flight”)

                                                                                                  

I was in a small crowded bar and Denzel Washington was the bartender

making and I mean MAKING his “famous” (?)Vodka Martini.

I’d never had a Vodka Martini in my life but, you can be sure Mom had, that being her signature… Martinis and she breathed vodka.  After scotch and gin anyways.

 

So I was just….a pussy. But right now I wanted one, a drink that is,

more than anything in the world along with the pretty girl next to me I wasn’t going to have either.

 

Denzel? He was kind of a metrosexual wearing plaid white and red patterned shorts and swinging his hips very, very sure of himself, as any young hot cocky tight long shorted 90’s kind of bartenders will be with THAT WALK and yeah I checked the package and

I can assure you I didn’t measure up to that dude no way.

So he leaves for some ice long enough for me to

try to impress the pretty girl next to me who was as devastatingly, tantalizingly,

outrageously lovely as Halle Berry, just not

Halle Berry.

 

I tried and failed the girl too. I slipped behind the bar talking all the while and

fumbling like a clown with gloves on, no James Bond I, my

Vodka Martini was a mess, I couldn’t even pour it right, something about shingles?

Using shingles to pour it out? But when Denzel came back and

whipped it back showing me all the while what it takes to be the big D as Denzel always did he was just

so cool, that fucking great smile he had where his eyes get all squinty when he laughs

even though he’s mad as a hornet at the A-hole disrespecting him,

Is that a black thing? That smile?

Damn. Too cool for school that guy. I met him once, at Sundance, stuttered, he… laughed and said,

“Come on, spit it out!”

And smiled at me that same squinty smile. Damn.

patted me on the back too it seems maybe THAT was a dream and this isn’t.

That Martini again.

 

I knew it would be good. Like a ghost over ice with a bite like

Siberia… in Switzerland, the big ahhhhh..as you push off down the slope in a field of white like the gorgeous Vampire you want to chomp down on your neck and take you to that place where life and death are no more than a dream you can’t awaken from and really don’t want to anyways, which is why you took it in the first place, right?

 

And you want that dream, that drink that taste that shot to the heart that bite so bad that

you’d let a vampire suck your neck any time. Anywhere.

So I did. Take the drink take the gave my neck up for it what can I say I

wasn’t even a bar drinker I mean what am I doing here in this bar with Denzel and a pretty girl who looks like Halle Berry and isn’t?

 

I liked blunts and orange barrels, and mounds of 92%  Colombian snowflakes, and buds dipped in it and smoked with strong coffee at 7 in the morning and naked sweaty dance parties that went all night at the big communes way out in the country where I lived at 19 and never never ever wanted to leave.

And women that would roll over with you sooner than have a tofu sandwich and

I wonder why I have high blood pressure years later? Hell, its lucky I even

have a heartbeat.

I liked Guinness. And half and halfs. And shots of Tequila and G & T’s and this is why I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic thank you very much my name is …. (“ Hi … !”), because when I wake up in the middle of the night sober for 26 years, 5 months 5 days and 21 and ½ hours it boggles my fucking mind that I would dream about a Vodka Martini when I never even had a Vodka Martini in my whole fucking life. Okay,

so I saw the movie with Denzel. Okay it really shook me up like when he sat there under oath and whispered under his breath almost so low that no one heard him …I heard him,,, “god help me” because I had said those words to..”GOD HELP ME..PLEASE. ( and added ) … “I can’t handle this“

 

I really didn’t want to drive off the14th St. Bridge on the way to work that day even though my head hurt so bad the shit WASN’T WORKING ANY MORE. ANY OF IT no matter  how much I inhaled and held it Mr. President yes I voted for you too thank you very much.

All that cool water down there looking like a very promising respite from what was happening between my ears, yeah

 

Cold. Dark. Cold.. dark.

so

I asked  the big man.   I begged him

“GOD HELP ME..PLEASE. (and crying, no, whimpering, teeth clenched and shaking gripping the wheel so tight my knuckles were white)   … “I can’t handle this”.

 

And yeah, he answered and

“Snap!”

Yeah. There was relief.

Instantaneous and total relief the pain I’d had my whole frigging life it just..went..away..

“snap”   like smoke it

just WENT. AWAY.  Like that. Better than four barrels and a blunt better than a snowdrift sized pile of Columbia I’d tried so MANY times to snuff out that pain erase those memories NOT ALLOW them to rise to the surface of my consciousness,“No I won’t take that off no I won’t NO. I Won’t!”

It just went

the fuck, away.

He was listening,

he was waiting, patiently, and loved me always through all that…shit I ran myself through God forgive me please, I knew not what I’d done I swear to you and

when I finally got willing and just ASKED, just fucking ASKED…

he was there.

I was 26, no 28 years old by then wrecked, train wrecked wrecked, multiple drug busts wrecked, broke down broke wrecked, punching holes in walls forgetting to eat or shower for days and weeks sometimes I’d… friends said, these were my “FRIENDS” mind you… said

 

“We just figured you were gonna die”, wrecked.

 

And there he was, or she or whatever.

He she said to me as if he she was

right there next to me

“I have always been here for you and

I will always be here and, it’s okay you’re

going to be okay, and always will be. I’m here now.

And forever

I love you. I have always always loved you,

Just ask.

 

As he she whatever always is to this day started praying right now didn’t stop till…

 

Peace. At last, came,

Again and there I was at 3:14 AM with my black socks still on.

 

Now I can go back to sleep.

With my loves, with my life,

Finally.

Thank you

 

Thank you so very much God.

Peace. At last

There is a large pine tree sitting proudly, quietly,

high up on the hill

facing old Tupelo in

the meadow past

High South and the graveyard I

would go there by myself sometimes

during the day and or sometimes at dusk

sitting under its soft fragrant arms cradled, and safe.

I never told anyone (that I can remember anyways) or

took anyone there it was my safe space my go to

I was sheltered there

from the rain and sun

from fear and death and dying inside

entranced by the living wall of fireflies dancing weaving

my live drive in movie

their magic in the trees over the stream I

came back there to find her this time to

visit her my mother tree my warm green womb no one knew but me.

And as I came over the hill looking up and out my heart skipped quietly

she was still there

older, broader. A little bald from less

leaves but

stronger, wiser now and upon seeing her finding her there once again

I embraced her limbs sobbing weeping I knew not why.

Rubbing her sap over me

slipping my nose into a crotch in her limbs

and just loved her for being there still.

For sheltering my heart all these years you have no idea how many times

your memory saved me.

 

And,

I thanked her.

 

through the trees

from the farm

I could hear the band practicing deep drumming reverberating

was that Sky Blue and your peaceful love warrior crew

awakening my wounded heart opening my soul while I wandered through

fields full of memory and high grass and  brambles?

Or just band practice for the party

either way

 

gathering some of her fallen branches speckled with moss and lichen

and even some plastic bright orange shards I found under her

my legs scratched carelessly by brambles I didn’t care a

sprite like fawn all

big out sized bushy tailed not 5 feet away

bounds off through the high grass she was hiding in

again bounding off towards old Tupelo was that me?

still there playing in the fields my spirit my youth my innocence

full of brambles and pine in the meadow past High South on this

anniversary of our history or just a fawn

bounding away?

 

I brought back the fallen branches speckled with moss and lichen and even the orange plastic shards I found after all I was the fucking recycling manager once here a long time ago heck I think I was the very first recycling manager here come to think of it was I? Someone? Anyone got better memory than me mine is faulty and full of holes

and I left them the orange shards and branches in my assigned room in Aurora this

my totem is

my found art is

this gift you all gave me gave us this weekend was not just a few days in June no

much much more like a Tibetan gong sounding in our hearts all together I

would not be upset if it, this found art, was swept up in cleaning and recycled and composted

so… no worries there just some lichen covered branches and orange plastic shards., after all I was the recycling manger once too ya know.

 

I headed back now,

never will I forget that lone pine tree who cradled me and that I came to see her, find her, still there standing tall, broader, less leaves

my high meadow earth mother where she cradled me in her pine sap seeping arms and wept I know not why.

 

Leaving Sunday way way to soon I am truly torn as I pierce the veil and pull on to 64 to this present  worldly urban concrete trail home triggers you all the memories laughing hugging eating laughing kissing drinking the waters of our life together intertwined like brambles in the high meadow dancing yelling for joy laughing for joy crying for joy….

 

1. WAS. HERE
   I. AM. HERE
   I WAS ALWAYS HERE you told me with your smiles

I will ALWAYS BE HERE you  say so with your eyes

I am welcome I am loved and if

I die here as I hope to have lived here left my mark little bear prints

everywhere bits and pieces of me in fairs and food and music and Tupelo and

people dancing and memories and fights and affairs of the heart and of the loin yes

I have lived here proudly, rarely quietly, tall and true, stooped and swollen with age

and smelling of sap

brambles tangled in my hair your spirits smiling tangled in my heart but

still green 

still strong

still weeping with joy

 

thank you

Though I live on the corner of cool and classy well, I’m not.

 

My spackled grey spotted ‘85 Volvo needs a paint job, and an inner hub cap its

a 4 speed and I can leave the green lights faster than any $85 k roadster so fuck you

its

full of the kind of stuff old crazy guys carry around saying their gonna donate and never get around to it the

left of Bernie bumper stickers holding the whole cranky mess together

my

original glass and purple bungalow arthritic front door doesn’t quite sit right and pops loudly each time as it inches towards completion of its one lonely task

declaring

the resistance of one not wishing to have closure

with anyone or anything god dammit

hey! come on in the clutters not all mine our

 

white gone grey tiles on the kitchen floor always look dirty no matter how many times I

clean them the yellowed crusty sinks are deep and cantankerous there’s a

warp in the living room wood floor that sure ‘nough gives

the Fun House at the State Fair a run for its money my

roof & wooden siding are sooty. I’ll get around to that ….

 

one neighbor has OCD and I swear practically cuts her lawn with a scissors

the other  2 just hire perfection its so much easier

to pay to look good than actually participate while

I sit in revolutionary civil disobedience to suburban order as

 

dappled sun light goose down fine sifting through green fingers my squirrel nest craggy oak and 

gym rat Crepe Myrtle all muscle bound and wiry, stand guard over us. 

 

Let it all sink in to me, goofy grin, I won this Saturday afternoon prize when everyone has driven two hours to the beach me quietly prosperous lounging in the cats chair some rattan found on the side walk this yard and scraggly garden a respite from techno growing like kudzu all around me more

mushrooms than I can count should I eat some?

herds of giggly teens pass by glued to somewhere else I swear I’m gonna

miss this old house yet quietly knew,

when we moved here in’ 05,

someday,

I would have to

leave this place and well,

here I am.

Now, when I

asked for the divorce, she said nothing.

you know what I want today?

 

Hope.

 

And pancakes.

 

Hope that I don’t wake up to a reality again a

B grade science fiction groundhog day that is my life

the channel is stuck on

and I can’t change it.

 

And pancakes. the warm smell of your skin the soft sound

of your breaths caress the cocoon that is our bed, and pancakes,

and you.

 

Laughing that deep throated heartily tossed off sitting cross legged in bed

embarrassed as you snort choke smile try not to spit out your half chewed

pancakes

your

 

eyes slyly

admiring silently proclaiming “I love you” as you hit me

not hard

 

and we eat

our pancakes.

The great silence

has descended.

 

Deafening.

 

The streets forlorn, desultory.

 

A leaf rattles

a Timpani clanging from

a thousand closed orchestras my

cigarette

my lone companion.

the rivers always run

the

brook

always flows

as I walk on down the road.

 

Cool green summer sunset sweet

 

night comes,

gently.

 

Here we are

   quiet.

 

It brings us together

this bond

this spirit.

 

Blue comes the night

as blushing pink goes the day

 

dusk.

 

Bundle up! Stay warm

here

in the northern woods

where even the summer days

let you know

that winter

is not far behind and

as the summer blooms

the changing

 and fall

is coming soon

for summer

like a breath

sweet kiss

 

is gone.

I am the richest man in the world today …from

high on Himalaya

my soul sister arrived lifted a golden message this rainbow bird lands

tapping the divine illuminating papyrus and canvas her fingertips dance

..in Cary no less

a bright white light ..smiling from ear to ear beautifically for all 2 see this wonderful joy undeniable love abounds

Eminenence flows talent a river from mother heart spills intensity density depth illustrating sweet soul music ftom her brush..a feather touch i.m dizzy throughout drenched in artistic bliss sighh…I will ply my trades for

silver and gold this cool morning mere pennies amidst these true treasures these literary diamonds these emerald pastels reveal Gaia amidst the swirl..I’m a little girl laughing playing in the sand laughing I am the richest

man in the world today

As Joni sang her vast intimate throaty magical lyrical elixir Bobby sat waiting for his ride, reading Tolkien outside Lincoln hoping to be rescued from the rednecks and their longneck fueled bravado..rescued buy a mage a priestess of the coven of wordly arts strumming our hearts into an ecstacy so sublime she barely smiled tho Robby kissed her…and there were feathers, everywhere.

In our hearts..in our minds pouring down from heaven a gusher of angels smiling .

december memories of a warmer younger time left us with a smile so fine..feathers..floating everywhere.

 

Backstory or by way of explanation..

“my Joni Mitchell obsession her singing “Coyote” from “The Last Waltz”, my other milder empathy with Billy Pilgrim from Slaughter House 5..and his time travel, my hitching to Cali as a teen in the 70’s and the spiritual significance of feathers..

I gave my writing mentor a feather pen for xmas. She was stunned as she has a thing for feathers I din’t know of. Yet I knew when I saw it it was for her.”

I’m watching Scorcese’s ” The Last Waltz” on a Monday  night @ the Rialto here in Raleigh with my  2 buds

Alan &  Bill, a few years ago.

Both artists & musicians, who had raved that this was  the ” greatest  concert film of all time “

and I’m digging  Robbie  Robertson & The Band, that’s ” The  Band” with caps, jamming with  Dylan & Neil Young  and  a bowl full of others come to say goodbye and that’s all fine and dandy  but

then  Joni  comes on with her beautiful lanky  overbite and she starts into” Coyote”

and ..

I start to cry.

It hits me..

I, I can’t believe I never saw this movie  it was filmed at Winterland in ’74  and I had left in June to live on a commune and we used to go see The Dead there all the time but that’s not it,  its her..

it..she .. she was my muse her weaving visual adventurous  lyrical  hearts breaking over  spilled wine and

wet mossy rocks on a foreign beach somewhere  her rhythms.. they

were mine. i mean mine were hers…

all this time  I’d been

she was my muse and I didn’t even know it.

okay when I divorced my wife  I would play  Blue something like  5 times  a day for months but thats obsession not  …and it was mostly her early work

pining about  James Taylor and  the lonely road and  an old  Greek lover stealing her camera  .

I needed to write her. I needed her to know so.. I wrote this  offer.

I later  saw her in an interview and  pulled back from this  goggle eyed  insanity I had  cooked up,

see  she’s one tough old  bird and  just wants to paint and smokes  like a chimney, swears like a sailor, brooks no fools & lets you know it.

Frankly I was intimidated

I mean they say  never meet your hero’s right and I didn’t  want to meet her okay of course I wanted to meet her hell i wanted to hop in bed with her even  if we  were as old  as pillars of salt

really  I just wanted her to know and to read a few pieces and i thought I’d pay for that privelege even if she never even answered

and  so the question  remains

do I send the letter?

see attached.

Bob

Greetings Joni,

I propose under the rules of piracy a parlay, to negotiate a trade.

20 minutes of your precious day, reading 5 poems,

from my website , ( www.Stillvertical.net)

for either $800 in cash, or silver or

the sum total negotiated and agreed upon

from the group of the following found objects and found art:

 

First a collection of lovely, intriguing seashells I

gathered from a barrier island here in Carolina,

where pirates abandoned horses

left to wander, some 300 hundred years ago.

 

You can choose them by gross measured quantity,

( a cup, a bowl, a tray or a bucket full )

the final amount TBD depending

on your cunning and wiles or

your heartfelt desire..

And most important

for the love of seashells,

which for me,

whether they are worn or shattered,

whole or worm eaten I

love them all as,

they are precious beyond measure  a

memory of a life and the art house they created.

 

This is a beach where few know to go,

stretching miles east and west, rather than the brother and sister islands

that run north & south.

 

The shallow sand bar offshore allows this precious cargo to be gently rolled through

the surf and plopped onto the beach in such variety and quantity it boggles the mind.

 

You may also choose by size of shell, those the size of your finger or less.

Or can fit in your hand or larger. Both can be found there.

 

The island where they were found is known as Shackleford Banks,

and can only be approached by a ferry that drops you in the water at

either end of its 9 mile long, lonely and lovely Shangri La.

 

If, upon arriving and wandering, you are lucky,

you may meet some horses or a crab. Nothing else,

except for shells upon shells, shells truly beyond measure.

 

This, is bliss.

 

Being of generous spirit I am also willing to part with

my cherished copy of

Auberine Woodward Moore’s

“ For my musical friend”  publ’d 1900 &, sigh,  I’m really stretching here….

a rock I decorated, from the streets of Berlin.

Now if that very amazingly generous offer is not enough I will consider parting with one of

2 ladybugs, one cloth, one metal.

 

The metal lady painted by my good friend George Le Chevalier. ( www.GLCart.com )

 

The cloth one is a pet I keep close for friendship and warmth

and would be heartbroken to part with

so I choose to withdraw it from our parlay.

 

And finally, if you,  ( & not your agent ), turn out to be a hard bargainer,

which I imagine you may well be as you seem to be a very tough old gal,

we can discuss other possible trades like good tobacco but, and I insist on this,

 

I will absolutely not give you my found art piece “Basquiat as a child”.

 

No. No. a thousand times no…well

unless you would trade me for one of yours like,  “Turbulent Indigo”.

until then,

be well.

if not

you will always be my muse, even from afar.

 

at the encouragement of many I attempted to get this too Joni through her manager who politely declined.

if you know of a way feel free to send this to her

 

There was something about her dress she came out wearing it
entranced me it nagged me,
until this morning after my first coffee sparked my fumbling mumbling cloudy mind it
looked like a flapper’s dress but made of strips of… paper? Ribbons maybe ? And
wait, I got it Tina Turner ! When she would sing “Nutbush City Limits” and shim shim shimmy across the stage well
Grace doesn’t just shimmy man she rocks it she hops it she bounces barefoot she occupied that iconic look like
it was justa summer frock she slipped on..
Well that’s a start for one hot momma yes momma she has a 3 year old who is touring with
her I mean who is Grace Potter ?
Can she keep this up for two hours or more? Can I? Can everyone?
Everyone says she is insane live And I’m starting to see they aren’t even close to describing this

blonde bombshell rocketship to the musical stars

What past life karmic musicology crossed with what DNA that created this wonder
this apparition this Niagara Falls of talent pouring out and down on us ?

joy pure unadulterated joy I say

Growing up ( part time ) in Vermont, in the 60’s and 70’s summers
I’d to go to summer stock theater with my dad, he
who among other things a theater critic,
( Bennington , Marlboro, Dorset and Woodstock )

and when we got home after a show and I headed for bed he sat at his typewriter
with his silver thermos of coffee enough to charge him up all night to write his review,
which he would then drive to deliver to the Bennington Banner before dawn yes,
those were the days of typewriters, hard copies and hand deliveries 30 some
miles away to make deadline.
Those were the days before Ben & Jerry’s Vermont when I would be the only longhair
at Burr and Burton the Manchester high school drawing from 15 miles away and getting beat on by
the townies as I walked down the hall

Dad, he tended to be a vicious critic and that was hard but tonight as I sit here at 12:30 am
having witnessed something truly transformational by a native Vermonter who doesn’t
have a bad bone in her whole body and remarkably, there are enough good triggers
I am thinking of him and a tribute to her and well anything that makes me look back at
the train wreck that my relationship with my dad became before we said our sad goodbyes
and Vermont which I loved the way it was back then well that’s just dandy see

I am an exile from those glorious Green Mountains
my fathers family called home for over 200 years but Grace,
Grace brought me home.

unlike him this will be a glowing review a review of towering unmistakable
one of a kind talent that I now chalk up to one of my 3 lifetime musical regrets
1) That I missed my one shot to see Bob Marley in Cleveland I was sick that night and had a great date with Lisa this
tall tall blonde bombshell maybe that’s where part of the Grace infatuation
comes in more unrequitted infatuation more pc inappropriate heterosexual blonde obsessions
on my part yes I’m old and a sucker for beautiful blonde talent
and a love addict, so sue me. Others have already so get in line.

and next the second regret when I froze up in the 8th row and missed my chance to dance on stage with
Prince at the RBC center just a few years before we lost him too and now my third and
only regret I missed the first 10 or 15 years of her career
and “by jesus !’ ( Vermont vernacular) she’s a Green Mountain Gal (Vermonter ) too because if I had maybe
I would have abandoned my broken marriage years before abandoned my socially conscious career
and like my wandering high risk youth semi homeless Dead head teen years I would have travelled anywhere to hear her
and the amazing camraderie the amazing collection of folks who are were happy to play with her whether
it was the Stones or Jackson Browne or Lucius or Marcus King of Bob Weir or Kenney Chesney or Willie Nelson or Daryl Hall
its like

when I discovered Sean Costello, a one of a kind blues prodigy playing a monday night in Fat Backs bar bq in Buckhead in Atlanta and I swear I thought Eric Clapton was there until he played Robert Johnson no he WAS Robert Johnson or both and who died tragically
at a very young age and on my birthday no less but tonight no tonight
Grace is alive and well and worrying about approaching 40 and I am for one am
humbled and grateful

that SUPERSTARDOM has not put her on the map performing and headlining in stadiums
which she’d done leading in for other greats like The Rolling Stones and The Allman Bros.

I’m glad because well,

I’m greedy.

and I can see her and experience every molecule of her precious being up close and don’t have to share her with millions yeah,
she’s that good

Grace is from Burlington or there abouts I believe and has even created her own Northern Vermont Music festival
I mean I’d follow her off the end of the earth or off a cliff.. wouldn’t you ?

Why ?

Grace Potter is everything.

Amazing talent as a singer, performer and songwriter and a genuinely REALLY nice person who loves her life and is well incredible.
And that and she is drop dead gorgeous knows it is super super into it without being full of herself fully occupying her power her presence her talent
her sexuality I mean a woman who can play “Long Black Veil”, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Do ya Think I’m sexy”4
well..wow and nails all 3 well thank you Lord Jesus, Shiva, Gaia and Buddha combined man this is
transcendent rock n roll the old kind the original kind the kind that washes away all reason and brings you into
bliss and joy more joy then you’ve had in a very very long time and by…
I don’t even know Steven Tyler and Janis Joplin’s love child ?

So I was a “leetle’ worried as I had fallen hard after hearing “Paris Ooh La La” 12 years alte I had some cathcing up to do and Midnight is a great fucking album all of it and Mother Road just out wow.

And I’m am a Garce Potter newbie just a few months ago only to learn a LOT of people had heard of her.

Where was I ? lost in a crumbling traumatic codependent marriage gone bad? Why Yes a matter of fact exactly

lost ? Yes but now I’m found praise jesus and pass the glow in the dark squiggles everyone is wearing tonight including yours truly

so when I got slapped upside the head after hearing Paris I literally immediately went out and bought $300 VIP Passes and only regretted I couldn’t first go see her in Greensboro or Myrtle Beach right before and booked three nights in Beaufort

The world is such an amazingly dense place of different genres and talents that even someone like me
a dj, dancer and music enthusiast could somehow have missed her
hell I missed Michael Fronte’ too ! And right now post Covid everyone is out touring and partying
hard before another hammer comes down on all of us and well, me too.

So it was with some anxiousness and trepidation I booked the VIP pass for the Beaufort Music Festival as soon as
I heard she was headlining there as its one of my favorite places on the planet..

And she did not only NOT disappoint she really seriously blew my mind and I would put this performance in my top 10 over the last 50 years next too Prince’s Purple Rain tour yeah I’m that old, Bruno Mars in Vegas, some Dead Shows and Third World in NYC and Genesis with Peter Gabriel maybe close to Elton John at DAR Hall in DC after Yellow Brick Road

See its one thing to be famous and everyone knows your work
something else when someone can play songs you’ve never heard and hook you in over and over and that is just what Grace did.

She doesn’t seem too concerned about superstardom and is clearly in control and doing what she loves with people she really enjoys playing with and for and clearly enjoys herself hell goes wild too and well she is just fucking amazing and

rocks the house like no ones business

and I can stand 4 people from the stage and witness this glory.

I’m just going to give you a taste here of her last set

as she is known to play an amazingly diverse selection from one night to the next while also covering her hits and better known pieces lke

Medicine

Stars

Paris ooh La la

You and Tequila ( written by Deanna Carter and performed not tonight with Kenny Chesney )

she also played her own new

Mother Road

Rose Colored rearview

or that she’s played with

the Rolling Stones, Allman Bros, Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne and Daryl Hall

but here are some of the others she’s covered recently

Bill Withers Use me

Long Black Veil by The Band

Rod Stewart Do ya think I’m sexy

Atlantic City Bruce Springsteen

Friend of the Devil – Grateful Dead & performed with Bob Weir

Even Whole lotta love – Led fucking Zeppelin and
some Hendrix when you can come down off Cloud 9

stop and think about the range that requires the cajones to pull those all off which she does

or that she had Jackson Browne, Lucius and Marcus King BACKING HER UP singing HER SONG

“Each other” on the Late Show

Not that she’s short of her own excellent material heck she has 5 albums

Set List shows her covering

the Bee Gees, the Beatles, Beyonce, the Black Crows, Black Sabbath, Blind faith ,
Blondie, David Bowie, Boys to Men, Buffalo Springfield , Burt Baccarat
I already said Bruce and Browne and that’s just the “B’s”

I’m a pretty damn talented DJ and I know how to mix genres like nobody’s business
but this..

I mean I love this woman… my god

so what did she play tonight? well

after doing a huge set of her own that rocked the house

she ends with

this is her last set no lie

White Rabbit -Jefferson Airplane pure psychedelic rock totally original version

Paris Ooh La La, her own blows everyone away we all THE WHOLE CROWD just freaked..
the fuck OUT

Sweet Dreams – Eurythmics slow mysterious deep

When Doves Cry-Prince she plays electric piano while her guitarist shreds it

also her drummer and bass are women too both outrageous then

a snatch of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti from 19 fucking 55

I want to point out she kept talking about going to be 40 soon I Mean Lil Richard?
Then..

a snatch of The First Edition’s 1967 “ Just dropped by” ( better known as
“ to see what condition my condition was in” )

keeps joking about playing Freebird and kinda of apologizes
while acknowledging the Arkansas roots in her bands guitarist

then tells the back story for her new insanely great

“Lady Vagabond”

( here is her “back story for the song” as explained by her )

“ I’m a teenage runaway who ends up with a family in Ecuador and the paterfamiilia is a famous Matador who goes on an Iahuasca psychedelic journey and decides he can’t kill bulls anymore and frees them all”…! ) ….. Hunh ?

the song is insanely ( okay I’m going to stop saying fucking and insanely I promise I am just running out of superlatives here )
great and they said it was only the second time
they’d played it live and the crowd went wild

no I mean WILD

I mean NO ONE IN THIS CROWD has even heard It as the album was released last week and you can’t even get it yet and here we are hearing it and its epic and we’re singing along ? !!! and totally getting down ? !!

then she ends with her own

oh and she has played electric fender rhodes piano and live piano, three different guitars
dances her ass of all barefoot and then puts on a sparkly black cape coat for

Stars
again I’ve never heard it and I am almost in tears..

My only regret that I couldn’t be following her like I did the Grateful dead for 10 years back in their glory days the 70’s and 8o’s

Someone please someone start recording her live albums my god

how am I even going to be able to sleep?

Answer.. I didn’t. I wrote this instead and now its 2 am

 

 

“Dreams do come true in Vegas”

People come to Vegas often wanting to fulfill a fantasy, such as winning a million, living the high life, or experiencing their favorite celebrity. Well, here’s mine.

Let’s dream big — like hanging out with superstar Bruno Mars in a posh bar and lounge he curated. One that feels like some luxe fantasy-penthouse sunken living room in the round, saturated with some out-of-this-world live and DJ music and then (heck, let’s go for broke) toss in dancing with Janelle Monae and her friends on an intimate carpeted dance floor.

Oh wait. I did that. On a Monday night no less. With a few close friends —
maybe 200 of them.

This is Vegas, baby! At. Its. Best.

Monday wasn’t just the day after the Super Bowl. It was opening night of Bruno’s ultra-lounge, the Pinky Ring, at Bellagio. And as a major Bruno fan, I had to be there. No matter what.

For those not in the know, “Pinky Ring” is from Mars’ iconic worldwide smash hit “24K Magic” and the now-unforgettable line, “Players, put your pinky rings up to the moon! Girls, what yoa’ll trying ta do?”

You can go rock with the Super Bowl champions and Marshmello. Fine with me. This, however, is my fantasy come true and as Bruno declared on Monday, “This is it! And you’re never gonna hear anything like the Hooligans. I’ve traveled all around the world with these guys and they are tight!”

No doubt.

I was shocked and incredibly excited to learn that Bruno Mars was going to bring his own personal style to a venue that’s so special and intimate, it’s hard to believe that the Master of 24K Magic was sitting a mere 30 feet away, while we mortals got down to some fantastic beats blasting out of his killer band.

The super-tight Hooligans run the gamut from jazz-infused funk jams to epic covers, from Curtis Mayfield and Michael Jackson to Motown classics or Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real.” And man, do they lay down the groove.

The pre-opening Saturday night was a private star-studded event with Janelle Monae singing “Tightrope” in a duet with Bruno, all while Lady Gaga, T Pain, and others rocked along.

Oh, did I mention all his Grammys are on display as you walk in?

Though there’s no guarantee Bruno will sing, he did two numbers on Monday, including Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It on.”

So beat feet to Bellagio and be sure you catch this stellar experience. The Hooligans are playing for two weeks, through Sunday the 25th. Other guests drop in, like Lady Gaga’s bandleader and horn player Brian Newman.

The Pinky Ring opens at 5 p.m. and closes at 2 a.m., 3 on the weekends. The music starts around 9. Arrive early for the great DJs and dancing, where you’ll find me. Tables for two or four go quickly. Seatings are for two hours and minimum spend is a ridiculously low $75 per person. And like his show, no phones or videos. What happens in the Pinky Ring stays in the Pinky Ring.

There’s some standing room only. And that, for now, is free.

Be there. You’ll never forget it.

 

 

I’m back in Vegas, it’s beautiful, and I’m killing it on the dance floor.
Standing at the bar, a lovely asks,
“I saw you dancing. Wow. Are you with the band?”
Next some guy offers to buy my hat for $100.
It seems I’ve become the unofficial house dancer at Bruno Mars’ Pinky Ring.

Though Bruno announced in his Saturday late-night set,
“It’s not The Pinky Ring. It’s The Panky Rang.”

If you missed my article or Anthony and Andrew’s post-Super Bowl YouTube video, where I strongly encouraged you to high-tail it over to the “Panky Rang” and missed the super value play, believe me, in the world of Vegas club experiences, this is still so far above the rest, ya gotta go.

Everyone I’ve met there have been staggered by hanging with Mr. 24 K Magic,
rockin’ it in his super-intimate ultra-posh penthouse lounge.
(You never know if he’s there until, well, he’s there, but hint: Hooligans.) Remember, max capacity is an insanely tiny 186, so maybe 170 get in.
And on busy nights, there’s a line.

If you come in between 5 and 8 p.m there’s no table minimum — again, amazing by Vegas club standards.
From 8 p.m. on, you’re buying the table for the night. This is a very good thing.

Depending on whether the Hooligans (and possibly Bruno) are playing or the Diamonds, the rates change. You can get a table for two for $150, the minimum. But with the Hooligans on stage, it jumps to $300-$700.
A larger table for 6 to 8 is $1,000 or more. Still a great value by Vegas club standards.

If you want to meet the man, be respectful. Don’t bum rush his space, as Carl and Michael, Bruno’s security, will stop you cold with THEIR pinky.

But do tell Baez, the host at the door, that Bobby Vegas sent you. Please.

The DJs spin around the band, who play at least two sets starting at 9 or 10.
The Hooligans do mostly jazz and funk for the first set, then more soul, funk, pop and disco (my fave) the second set.
If Bruno joins them, he plays maybe four songs.

I grew up on “Soul Train,” so believe me when I say that when Bruno sings, Marvin Gaye it’s nothing less than amazing.

I bumped into a big guy at the bar who I thought was gonna break down and cry. “I been comin’ to Vegas forevah! An’ I never seen anything like this this we did shots with Bruno, man! Shots!”

Bringing this back to LVA, is the Pinky Ring still a value play? Let me answer a question with a question.

If two orchestra seats at Bruno’s Dolby Live show at Park MGM set you back $600-$700 smackolas, is it worth spending $700-$1,000 to hang with the man in his very own lounge, living the 24 K magic live?
Your other half will love you forever and you’ll talk about it for years.
So if you can’t figure that out, please just go back to where you come from.

Oh, and the final secret? SRO is still free, if you can get in. So get in, early.

5  hours spinning

in the back room

outside nuremberg

dissing me “You’re on

2nd stage”  beat blurs

into dawn sleep

wake on the

autobahn onto

my next gig

here we come leipzig,’

lady J

my chauffeur,

she’s ‘

twice as cool

as me can spin, sing it

lay it out in  7

tongues , handle a gun

brooks no shit from any coked

out producer fools we

got

no sleep, hey its sweet

i’m a rock star baby

yeah its  a grind

5k a nite

its my life

hip  hop down the block

gonna never stop

festivals and pool halls

giant  clubs and outside a mall

curtis calls me come to brooklyn

drakes got my 40 g’s waitin

got some new tunes cookin

hey down we go

tryin to avoid the ho’s

morning after

my mind is shattered

weekend over

rest an relax

find my brutha’s

let the past go

like it never mattered

stop thinkin bout

in the window I spy

my mother

your worthless

no good

thanks dad

takes one to know one

i’m no shy

onto the next show

gotta a  studio gig

a tv spot

putting out a new  lp

goin for the top slot

chasin dreams=

ghosts try 2 catch me

I keep movin

they’ll never get me

gotta  stop let the curtain

down

get real drop the smile

beyon bein a clown

put the  ghosts to rest

get back to what

I do best

its friday again

flying 2  ibiza

i’m a  rock star

nothin sweeter

( inspired by the Denzel Washington movie “Flight”)

                                                                                                  

I was in a small crowded bar and Denzel Washington was the bartender

making and I mean MAKING his “famous” (?)Vodka Martini.

I’d never had a Vodka Martini in my life but, you can be sure Mom had, that being her signature… Martinis and she breathed vodka.  After scotch and gin anyways.

 

So I was just….a pussy. But right now I wanted one, a drink that is,

more than anything in the world along with the pretty girl next to me I wasn’t going to have either.

 

Denzel? He was kind of a metrosexual wearing plaid white and red patterned shorts and swinging his hips very, very sure of himself, as any young hot cocky tight long shorted 90’s kind of bartenders will be with THAT WALK and yeah I checked the package and

I can assure you I didn’t measure up to that dude no way.

So he leaves for some ice long enough for me to

try to impress the pretty girl next to me who was as devastatingly, tantalizingly,

outrageously lovely as Halle Berry, just not

Halle Berry.

 

I tried and failed the girl too. I slipped behind the bar talking all the while and

fumbling like a clown with gloves on, no James Bond I, my

Vodka Martini was a mess, I couldn’t even pour it right, something about shingles?

Using shingles to pour it out? But when Denzel came back and

whipped it back showing me all the while what it takes to be the big D as Denzel always did he was just

so cool, that fucking great smile he had where his eyes get all squinty when he laughs

even though he’s mad as a hornet at the A-hole disrespecting him,

Is that a black thing? That smile?

Damn. Too cool for school that guy. I met him once, at Sundance, stuttered, he… laughed and said,

“Come on, spit it out!”

And smiled at me that same squinty smile. Damn.

patted me on the back too it seems maybe THAT was a dream and this isn’t.

That Martini again.

 

I knew it would be good. Like a ghost over ice with a bite like

Siberia… in Switzerland, the big ahhhhh..as you push off down the slope in a field of white like the gorgeous Vampire you want to chomp down on your neck and take you to that place where life and death are no more than a dream you can’t awaken from and really don’t want to anyways, which is why you took it in the first place, right?

 

And you want that dream, that drink that taste that shot to the heart that bite so bad that

you’d let a vampire suck your neck any time. Anywhere.

So I did. Take the drink take the gave my neck up for it what can I say I

wasn’t even a bar drinker I mean what am I doing here in this bar with Denzel and a pretty girl who looks like Halle Berry and isn’t?

 

I liked blunts and orange barrels, and mounds of 92%  Colombian snowflakes, and buds dipped in it and smoked with strong coffee at 7 in the morning and naked sweaty dance parties that went all night at the big communes way out in the country where I lived at 19 and never never ever wanted to leave.

And women that would roll over with you sooner than have a tofu sandwich and

I wonder why I have high blood pressure years later? Hell, its lucky I even

have a heartbeat.

I liked Guinness. And half and halfs. And shots of Tequila and G & T’s and this is why I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic thank you very much my name is …. (“ Hi … !”), because when I wake up in the middle of the night sober for 26 years, 5 months 5 days and 21 and ½ hours it boggles my fucking mind that I would dream about a Vodka Martini when I never even had a Vodka Martini in my whole fucking life. Okay,

so I saw the movie with Denzel. Okay it really shook me up like when he sat there under oath and whispered under his breath almost so low that no one heard him …I heard him,,, “god help me” because I had said those words to..”GOD HELP ME..PLEASE. ( and added ) … “I can’t handle this“

 

I really didn’t want to drive off the14th St. Bridge on the way to work that day even though my head hurt so bad the shit WASN’T WORKING ANY MORE. ANY OF IT no matter  how much I inhaled and held it Mr. President yes I voted for you too thank you very much.

All that cool water down there looking like a very promising respite from what was happening between my ears, yeah

 

Cold. Dark. Cold.. dark.

so

I asked  the big man.   I begged him

“GOD HELP ME..PLEASE. (and crying, no, whimpering, teeth clenched and shaking gripping the wheel so tight my knuckles were white)   … “I can’t handle this”.

 

And yeah, he answered and

“Snap!”

Yeah. There was relief.

Instantaneous and total relief the pain I’d had my whole frigging life it just..went..away..

“snap”   like smoke it

just WENT. AWAY.  Like that. Better than four barrels and a blunt better than a snowdrift sized pile of Columbia I’d tried so MANY times to snuff out that pain erase those memories NOT ALLOW them to rise to the surface of my consciousness,“No I won’t take that off no I won’t NO. I Won’t!”

It just went

the fuck, away.

He was listening,

he was waiting, patiently, and loved me always through all that…shit I ran myself through God forgive me please, I knew not what I’d done I swear to you and

when I finally got willing and just ASKED, just fucking ASKED…

he was there.

I was 26, no 28 years old by then wrecked, train wrecked wrecked, multiple drug busts wrecked, broke down broke wrecked, punching holes in walls forgetting to eat or shower for days and weeks sometimes I’d… friends said, these were my “FRIENDS” mind you… said

 

“We just figured you were gonna die”, wrecked.

 

And there he was, or she or whatever.

He she said to me as if he she was

right there next to me

“I have always been here for you and

I will always be here and, it’s okay you’re

going to be okay, and always will be. I’m here now.

And forever

I love you. I have always always loved you,

Just ask.

 

As he she whatever always is to this day started praying right now didn’t stop till…

 

Peace. At last, came,

Again and there I was at 3:14 AM with my black socks still on.

 

Now I can go back to sleep.

With my loves, with my life,

Finally.

Thank you

 

Thank you so very much God.

Peace. At last

World renowned Gaza poet Refaat Alareer was, along with his brother, nephew, sister and 3 nieces

killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6th.

I learned of his death on the 9th, started writing and crying on the 10th and wrote this piece on the 11th.

 

They say he was my enemy

he was a poet and Palestinian

but I am a poet too, and a Jew.

More than any rabid Zionist he

was my brother as only a few can truly be I

wept for days though until now he was someone I barely knew.

For him his sword was a pen,
his voice a military barrage breaking through the walls of denial his
land mines his mind exploding our preconceptions

his bomb,
was his heart.

Full of to bursting with love and kindness and for this

they killed him murdered him and his family too

because truth is the most powerful weapon of all

again if I only knew you Refaat

I had to learn to even pronounce your name and now

I am enrolled.

Committed to this discipline you outlined and grew

Yet he asked of all of us in his final poem just before, that
when he died, as he did just last week
to tell his tale
to tell ours too to let our voices never stop

to teach others young and old that their story their voice is paramount to evolution and though the revolution will not be televised
the genocide is on Al Jazeera all the time.

You see when others witness the truth there is no way they can condone this

suicide of our hearts and minds to continue
yet

how do we heal all those shattered dreams the Kristallnacht of
todays banner headline
“More are killed and more to come, MORE! MORE!“
it seems it will never end isn’t that
the worst nightmare of all?

Isn’t this what they want our enemies of hate and fear
for both the traumatized for a thousand years
Jewish hearts as so many of my friends are, full to the brim how
do we turn this denial into hope? This trauma into a way to cope

first,

we must weep and grieve all the losses we could not keep the bloody visions that keep us from sleep from being destroyed, on both sides this nightmare seeps
you see

Refaat was a threat.

To violence he was a threat to indignity he was a threat to
ignorance a firestorm burning away misunderstanding he was a threat to genocidal destruction raining 2000 pound bombs all down around him he would not leave his home in Northern Gaza his last stand until the very end
even in fear of being killed knowing
he was a Power Target a “terrorist” marked for assassination a
threat to the inherent corruption of intolerance that surely came for him he
spoke up he

reached out

and though his heart no longer beats even though
we do not hear his kind and gentle voice appealing to us all around the world we hear you Refaat we see you Refaat we embrace you we
carry you
your voice we …. I weep.
for you for us I….weep I cannot seem to stop.

But I

share your story the poets story the philosopher story the professor of your young men the activist teacher of English lit and it is ours now
as you taught us so kindly so quietly so
patiently it burst through a claxon of clarity
and the bombs came closer

to do our part to shout our story out because
as long as one voice is left Refaat you told us
as long as a poet is still writing as long as one professor is still standing teaching as long as one mother brother father sister is loving
one doctor and nurse are healing …. Refaat,

we have won.

In loving Honor and Memory Refaat Alareer

born September 23, 1979, Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, Gaza Strip

murdered December 6, 2023 Northern Gaza

age 44 survived by his wife Nusbaya and friends.

His brother, brother’s son, sister and her 3 children were killed in the bombing

This memorial to the day we

remember the fallen from

long ago.

My father his fallen still standing..

so many others yet

the fallen are fresh they

were not

warriors the dirt not yet scattered

on their tiny graves Amanda Gorman

already posted a poem for Uvalde’s fallen tho

they were not warriors no

I didn’t.

I can’t.

I’m weak. I can’t.

But that is as it should be

her steadfast brilliance seemingly born

into her her youth our

Poet Laureate magic mage word sage in reality if not

in name only.

I didn’t.

I can’t.

I don’t want to I’m

frozen.

By choice I..

the rewounding it’s just too much

the public grieving the…no

I  seek

Darkness. Quiet.

I choose to be encapsulated in my privileged

front porch safety wishing it away the greatest danger

my own

incapacity.

I choose to not feel

this horror this

infinite tragedy that

is our incompetence our

inability to render

sweet justice for

the most vulnerable

among us.

 

 

We.

kill.

Children.

 

And go on.

I choose not to feel as

Amanda does quietly encapsulating horror and hope her

eloquence unfolding a preturnaturally

climate warmed iceberg revelation

washing over us cleansing, soothing us her clarity

clear blue water verse healing our

broken universe this curse this gift to

see. To feel.

I don’t want it anymore I am the iceberg.

White.

Frozen.

Stoic.

Standing unwilling in-

capable locked in anger Amanda left long long ago

not

turned it into from helpless against the rage I refuse

I don’t want healing

I want it to stop !

It gets harder with age doesn’t it?

When mother died

She blew up, blood

coming out of every pore, Dad

he shot himself in a boat he made

while out on the lake the

church

where I go

to sit with god and his mates

has

stained carpets and funky chairs you

sometimes have to

walk up or down a flight of

rickety stairs our

shame is left

with the coffee grounds

as we

go out smiling

and greet the day

 

 

There are always a few things I’ll remember about war

A cold winter night, Vermont

around ‘72

piles of snow slide off the roof

with a roar

and

back into my warm covered slumber I go

only to be awakened by shouting and my dad

lifting me out of bed

mumbling wide eyed

carrying me downstairs

sweat pouring off his body

to the living room

where my brother and step mother stood

cold feet on a wooden floor

and my dad screaming

“JUMP ! “ JUMP “ !

and is off to rescue others from a plane on fire in his mind

from a war gone for over 3 decades before

I’ll always remember those few things about war.

 

We love you Dad

rest in peace.

 

 

As you get halfway down

in the bottle

you find

more and more

what you’re looking for.

That’s what math means to me.

 

 

I wish I was born black

maybe then

I could write better poetry no,

this is all I have I wish I could

quote Whitman and

impress you with  my oratory no,

ya see  I

barely stumbled out of high school in a

hallucinogenic daze

passing out and

crashing  cars wandering around in

my very own purple haze an’

if I could spew eloquent  verse like

the wind flowing through the trees I’d…

no,

        this,  is all I have just  this broken down middle aged

white guy crying the “what the fuck happened  to me? ” blues

just this struggling back from addiction depression abuse compulsion how

the hell did I get so messed  up tune no,

I’m not black but

    maybe in my life there’s been enough pain and

maybe I’m not Gay but deep down somewhere in that young 

fatty lonely little nerdy Paisley pantsed wearing dope fiend brain there’s a

wee  bit of compassion for the

Outcast in all of us yeah,

me too no, this, is  all I have just this

can’t have kids thank God the medication’s working my wife’s been sick for

FOUR YEARS now and

“ how many  twelve step meetings have you been to  today thank you

very much “ thing is  getting me just a LITTLE BIT DOWN and…

        “what? Gratitude? Yeah right “

if I can just walk this thin white line down the middle of the road

and not fall into the  abyss of my

all consuming  compulsions  this

self  abandonment I’ve  honed to a lonely art then maybe I could

write like you

sing like  you

love like you

dance like you maybe I could…. no hell

I don’t want to be you shit

I can barely figure out how to  be  me but hey, thats’

“Don’t mind him it’s just the liquor sugar dope anger mother  father shit talking

hey! Don’t touch me who the … how the hell did you get in here ! ?

 no I won’t take that off no ! I..”

twelve monkeys and  string chorus talking yeah, sure,

it’s cool, it’s  just the

screaming ranting panting whispering in the cold sweaty recess of my

clammy crammed little fucked up brain crying

 “HEY !” my name is Bob I’m a …. how do I get out of here? Talking

 but hey,

 it’s okay.   Really.

One more  day I’ll…be okay, really, besides

you should be watching  out for the  quiet ones, you know,

the ones in the corner over there, smiling looking all clean and  everything

you know

that don’t do the talking  that

don’t scream and  cry and rage and fight

because

all THIS, is just sitting inside them too an

evil stew, waiting

to brew waiting

to blow, no, really it’s okay after all

it sure is great not bein’ afraid anymore just one question,,

what do I do about being TERRIFIED? Hmmm?

No really, it’s okay

it’s the quiet ones you got to watch out for me,

I’ll be okay

really

me,  

       I’ll be okay

 

 

Beautiful beach of my dreams 

Morning’s momentary diamonds racing three

lovely ladies laughing the

water’s surface reggae playing sunshine

sparking Oceana’s dream orgasm spraying

kisses across the water’s rocks we’ve

uncovered mia Carioca’s treasures again her

determination revealing o praia dos

meos sonhos. preciosos jaieres dias our

precious jeweled days spilling

magic across our sand

here.

we are.

arrived.

at long last.

at love again thank you love

Praia dos meos sonhos 

beautiful beach of my dreams.

Tio  Bob

You ate my pancakes

then ate my chicken

and when I got mad

blamed it on me

you stole money

wouldn’t work

and when we

went into debt

you blamed it on me

though it was okay to

barge in on an abuse survivor

in the bathroom

and blame it on me

after years of self inflicted

pain

a prison I thought I deserved

I’m leaving you for happiness

and my heart is well served

we wanted a fantasy everyone craved

on a street that well you’d think

we were made

it wasn’t the house that we owned

but the home inside that

it wasn’t the house

it wasn’t a home

 

 

I took off my ring

my wedding ring

it took a week,

was it too soon?

when do you do this?

At first I took it off at night

and then put it back on

and would look at it like I hadn’t noticed it

before though it had been on my finger for 24 years

and I wondered if other people noticed

I took a business  trip  seeing  some folks who

have known me a long time  and

I didn’t  want to deal with them asking

if they noticed which they probably wouldn’t

that I wasn’t wearing it so

I wore it so

they wouldn’t ask

tho they probably wouldn’t

I told a friend who had been thru a long

grinding  traumatic separation

that I.d taken off my ring and

that it took a week she said

hey that’s okay, that’s big

I’m gonna miss this house

the yard my occasionally mowing

the fantasy of the too cool neighborhood

with the cool houses and cooler people all

living cool lives I know better now

I took my ring off

it took a week

Prepping Tiger’s cat box

with old newspapers I save for

that very purpose

Yes, I still read a newspaper,

religiously & joyfully

I came across a picture of J

Edgar Hoover in a book review

Yes, I read those too, and

wondered at the appropriateness

of Tiger pissing on J Edgar’s

chubby face….and realized

he’d probably like it

this coffee shop chair outside,

our beach

the cars

 whizzing past

our waves crashing

this cement shore relaxing

as any

sandy venue

this

 urban riviera

this

ragged umbrella

our own,

the sky still blue, blue, blue.

outside Lincoln round 72 my dirty blonde hair long, the late august days longer.

their crusty pickup jammed with rednecks drinkin’ from their longnecks

hooted and hollered, the first time, threatened and threw their empties @ me the second time as I watched their truck slowly circle  round the stretched  out  ramp in the late afternoon  heat and head back to “guarantee we’re gonna kick your faggot hippie ass!”  the third time

I’m praying a Buddhist prayer my last ride taught me “Nom Yoho Ringye Kyo!” over and over LOUDER and LOUDER ( “you can have ANYTHING you want just say it!” )  and I just wanted a ride like RIGHT NOW and it was no charm that one. as they got closer and closer..wait!

the trucker slides to a gravelly stop “hop in!” he didn’t have to ask twice throwin’ my pack in back and slamming the door “go! man! go! Go!” lookin’ out his little window as he hands me a short roach I wasn’t a religious man before then.

I am now.

 

We  have  seen evil

staring us down

we have heard evil

tearing at our hearts.

evil incarnate, unyielding, unforgiving

yet evil did not win

evil did not  stop us no

evil, did not  stop us

evil did not win.

we are bloodied, some broken

lost legions as we grieve an ocean of tears

yet

we have  seen evil wane

we have seen good rise

an eagle, a  young  poets   eloquence

a  woman  becoming  leader

an elder, heart  split open

sharing  his grief, our pain

this is not just another  Wednesday

this is a new  day.

 

 

And to my neighbor Roy Lowry from Arlington Va

an exceptional gentlemen and gardener

who told me this story one day

as we stood in the sunshine watching Butterflies

 

“Butterflies  Dance”

 

What a spectacular Azure summer day

the sky so blue I could drink it the field

a three day beard of stubbled yellow stalks

pointing forlornly to the sky

from our hidden vantage these crippled giants these

desperate Redwoods stand

abandoned

stripped, of their jewels…. and Poppies blazing red a

herd of them poking awkward, ridiculous bobbing waving

in the breeze ah Anzio, Anzio what a georgous day

but when the artillery hit the barrage blew a hole open so wide the

field stubble came pouring in and

as I scrabbled for a foothold the ground,  liquid under me my  hands

finding perch

something solid… a shinbone? I….

all  around me the  Poppies lay scattered and  dying.

Later, silently smoking my last precious  Camel I watched a German P.O.W.

(  9 feet tall and  strong as an ox ), marching back and forth yelling and

grabbing other  tired, wasted  volunteers he begged us for our

poncho’s

to use as stretchers to haul out the wounded later that day they

put him in a prison cage and the  truck  drove away I…

never saw  him again but

I was witness, he was a hero that  day.

I dig flowers now,  in my garden out back the

radio plays over  terraces of  Impatiens, Vinkas, Roses  &  Mums as I

rail against  the Republicans  laying waste to everything that lies  in their path

but on this late summers day

with the sky as blue as  an Azure  soda I

watch the  butterflies dance,

one yellow,

one black

and go back to my garden

where  no Poppies grow,

or ever have or,  ever will.

do u write ? she asked
” all the time.
come over to my house
you’ll find
half assed note books & papers discarded I’m a

messy writer between cold fried chicken fingers chocolates and ginger brew and endless coffee
pens everywhere a litter of literary endeavors most,
are shit
some abandoned left for dead
a few
abused
THIS IS A SHITTY POEM I WROTE
scrawled across the front
over there a gaggle of diatribes and collected lies
there a coven of yearnings and i’m transcribing now
and can’t read my own writing here so fill it in your fucking self alright?

am i mad and I’m writing or is the writing making me mad i’m writing

ah glories and hurried stories

huzzahs to my breakthroughs
and
humbled mornings
a dedication to my minds eye wandering down
trying to calm the corridors the host of my ghosts

steering them into little boxes where they will lie quietly waiting

to be released upon you some might even see the light of day not if i can help it

then occasionally a glimmer, a rhythm, a tone a..

” I’d been working in retail for 500 years”

get back to me on that its not been born yet its just pregnant.

others i leave too horrific to deserve awareness or sharing but

yes, i write . i write on. i write on everything everywhere
mcdonalds receipts and paper bags greasy brown napkins remember the cold fried chicken right?

and sometimes i even write them down but only when they call to me they command me they sing to me
worry me, push me to grab them up again and engage them
others
are meant to be burned no, that’s way too dramatic they aren’t that good

for a funereal pyre

to be left for all time in the recyling bin and made into cereal boxes into lucky charms

yeah

i write.

all the time
“( while pissing )

oh shit I forgot the last line

“i think i’ll i can go dancing now”

maybe if all you ever heard

was
that drinking and drugging was the ultimate word

that life and love and havin fun was

found in a bottle or on your tongue

maybe if they way you deal with life

is escaping the injury and all the strife

burn it , eat fuck it toke it drink it spill
it live it smoke it

in tiny parcels that lock up those feelings
lay them under a mask of concrete up to the ceiling

then one day you find your in a room by yourself

all that you own can be put up on a shelf

your friends are married and havin’ a life

you cant figure out why you can’t get a wife

in anger you plow your hand right thru the wall

not being your place you cover it up..that’s all-

time isn’t slippin’ its drippin’

life isn’t happnin’ its missing

there’s something wrong but u can’t put your fingertip
on it you slip in another bit and hit it

what happened ?

how’d I get here where is here? where is the beer

I’m tryin’ to piece how my life got so shattered

and why it seems only this little fire is the only thing that matters

guess I’ll go on maybe one day I’ll no longer be in tatters

can someone please help me its only my life but it matters

I’m told that Elvis has left the building.

am I safe yet?’

tho I survived the validation day massacre
for months my heart lay broken.

Maybe
when u welcome me back again
with open arms smiling
forgiveness in your desire to
include me
shield melting hardened after
judging that maybe u should exclude me
convicted without trial or chance to express
how I had never knowingly or otherwise
crossed the invisible line of
inappropriate behaviors I was
painfully, shyly, self consciously aware of

to honor it.

all to no avail.
we

could dance again make love in waves
of uninhibited coupling thru the beat a
communal orgasm light weaving ecstatic around us dancing
the
bright fantastic I was
at a rainbow bar on Saturday without you
where acceptance flowed all around and thru me
and they were strangers,
you are not.

When u welcome me back with open arms again
as others do so willingly

I will be there

Ever blown the night shifter-reverse-lock-out-collar-repair-kit escaping the city almost lost (zombie) angels flew the starkly georgeous desert scape ?

found youself standing still timeless beauty million year old landscape ? Ever

gambled all 36 hours straight nothing but Vegas jonesing and caffeine still up and having breakfast

at 3 am at ellis island’s legendary diner hey !”
weekend hookers from alburquerque and Cirque performers hungering
this IS MY PLACE !“
ever

seen cher and andrew dice clay? In the same night bumped into Flavorflav
at Benihana’s with his 6 ft Nordic dream date
while your sales bro is harrassing the Soux chef whose prepping your meal with flying knives ever

been to an early am aa meeting catching the dealers off their graveyard shift ?

“we’re just here for the free coffee mate “

watched a rhythm roller from Jersey at the Gold Coast makin’ the dice sing a slow sweet song over and over, “ c’mon easy 8 make it HARD EIGHT !!

calling Big Red on the come out! Got it ! Hop the Ballerina can’t be sweeter !

Ever lost your mind danced dawn till your frozen in time ski’d mt charleston

rocked the Red Rocks hiked the block

fleed to Fremont ?

Watched a whale drop a quarter mil at the Wynn and walk off for a soda what?
Fallen for the pit boss she who rescued you from a blood sugar drop?

Naw ?
thass a right

go home tourist
leave it to the mean streeters the odds tweakers

get on your bird home hungover I got a pocket full and you got a t shirt

love you vegas baby love you my sweet sinful straight no chaser still not drinking 3 decades later
been there done that sit tay by the forever gone forever sea was no more

love you baby

you’re mine Vegas

always will b

that why they call me bobby v mate and

THATS WHY I LOVE VEGAS

Whatever you do, don’t write.

Above all else DO NOT sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to keys DO NOT

pause to contemplate or
listen to the VOICE or talk to
your muse run, run run away, in the other direction in
ANY direction get a life, get two. Get lost. Have kids. Build a boat have
an affair get
drunk. Fight. Find an addiction but

I beg of you save yourself from the unrelenting agony the
pull like a magnet that draws you back and won’t let you go a
horror story unfolding quietly in your mind as you try desperately to

think of something ANYTHING to

occupy your time and
let the hours slip by unproductively but most importantly
unrecorded, unwritten, unresolved on paper or captured on disc because
if you don’t
or more to the point if you do
get started and

you ask yourself.. “What if…?”

and you find a pen and write it down on the back of a napkin start
scribblling in the car while stopped at a light on the way to the store or
trying to get to that all important appointment you know the one that will change your career which you desperately need since you’re sure not making any money writing and
you end up making the appointment and you get the career the
money the house the wife the love you’ve always wished for .. but,

IT WON’T MATTER!

Because all the while you’ll be thinking..

” How can I get away for just a little while ?”

and then slowly, irrevocably it will begin again and
you find yourself sucker into the vortex pulled
into the maw swallowed whole as the Moby Dick of your writing Jones grows and grows
quitely
inside you to
use you exhaust you expend you and toss you away an empty carcass on the rocks of some
forgotten beach all
for the pleasure ( ? ) the
satisfaction ( ? ) of knowing you let the

snarling tiger out of its cage and
as it bounds down the hallway ROARING at you and
LEAPS AS IT LUNGES FOR THE KILL YOU..!!!

you’re..still ..ah alive to tell the tale yourself you
finished. you
made it
to
THE END.
Only to do it all over again.

When u bury me

bury me with Puddy’s bone

surround me with the angel feathers

I’ve collected
to wing me home the

trinkets of memories the broken seashells

the illustrations the scars the adventures bury
me with Stevie’s little bed and her picture next to my woven heart heartily
bury me with my poetry my dance tapes my wedding ring to whom I wed
and Malu’s card case she gave me inscribed

“Beyond right and wrong there is a field
I will meet you there”
and tho
we couldn’t manage in the end

we tried and tried for 30 years before love faded b4
bitter recrimination bloomed and bled b4 the most loving thing I could do
was let her go.. in the end
so
bury me in joy and sadness a life saved by
professional angels and volunteers of fellow travelers who
pieced my broken humpty dumpty heart back together again
chronicling there was enough to have killed three or more
but I didnt die did I? at least not till now as you gather round
all I was
wishing for to leave this world a little better than I found it to do no harm
and to the hearts
and minds I encountered to those I charmed give a dance engage in a jest
describe me at best did I? sometimes failing
miserably getting up and mumbling agonized insecure apologies for my inadequacies
trying again
please I beg of you now
bury me let me go bury me so I can go on to that place that next great adventure

beyond right and wrong in a field where love exists across the Rainbow bridge where all my rescues went and my broken loves and my furry ones too where we have a chance to rest before
the next chapter unfolds I seem to have
lived a half dozen loves and a half dozen lives in this passing I am billy pilgrim in a cage looking down up at you from another time another place another face
and at least three lives before does that make me a cat and I’ve already punched my ticket past?
Bury me with Tiger’s bones now gone to ashes and all the little paw prints
bury me deep in the soft soft ground the oak leaves I composted and worked up the hard clay soil I found
bury me in your hearts and remember a joke well told

a Santana’s dance unfold a challenge and story bold bury me
but please don’t forget me

I will never forget you and
thank you
bury me now
it seems at this time
I just need to sleep

Writing i.m a bon fire a live wire a literate drag racer burning paper to the final winners circle

Hurled

Thru to a place quiet clarity speed of light all slows down momentary stand still illusion ?

Touch the place shed hesitate and leap into space falling Luke running from ” i am your father !”

I, a literate drag racer pealing back laying evocative rubber

I fly in 2 the winners circle

I won.

It’s a beautiful day and it’s midnight alight

I here the words buzzing a living rhythm write em down even just a sliver released grow to a river my happy this creation my Santana pealing notes from the literate heavens it’s profound I astound me i.m allowed to touch

the spark hark the cherubs sing my poetic lyre lures us home not alone anymore kindred spirit wearing a t-shirt decorated with past lives and bee hives brings us alive into our hive the honey our spiritual money communing

amidst the ruins we throw our runes to tunes that touch our smiles uncover heal our wounds ..i.m a bee in a hive again looking for flowers to empower its a beautiful day

and its midnight

bird on a wire

In the grocery store

Amidst American ghosts

floats a spirited host

down the cat food aisle.

wait!

that sweater its..

it’s better than any

Gucci or Gabana more like Nirvana you’re who?

I’m a bird alighted on

The wire brain on fire

a candle in the dark

Platonic playing in the park numerological atomic spark feeding furries and birds blurred no words yet many words we talked for hours uncovered our secret powers lying in our hearts flowers..

a ramblin rose we compose reconstruct from a past that decomposed

ate a spiritual cookie felt well fed..back 2 bed

the furries smiled “they’ll be friends “

 

To all the black sheep loners u r my flock spirited sisters n brothers we survived the parental apocalypse was our childhood torture to arrive whole broken opened to the universal truths i.m a fractured twig floating down the river of..

dreams I seem to be alive despite their our inherited destruction dysfunction among these ruins you come amongst us zombies full to the brim spilling vomiting illusion plastic prosperity give me one real rusty scheckel to trade while they heckle me

“who r u you wasted freak!?”

” I’m power in the mudnight hour you’ll never know cuz u sold your soul so long ago don.t even know you’ve been bled you’ve been dead since Eisenhower.

me i.m a black sheep so there i don.t care i.m freed from the slavers still embraced down in Charleston in ohio hitched to California just 2 get away as far from the nightmare awoke alive to Grateful not Dead and got ahead with out you trying to crush me cuz you can t stand seeng how incredibly unhappy u r

and real scares you to your very core I saw it i felt it I was poisoned by it but I left it and won running away was standing ground now i.m my own scarred..embedded tatto’d don.t forget it my spirit story sleeved my arms my golden warrior shield simple flesh colored real i.m the black sheep dancing you’re the skeleton

do u write ? she asked
” all the time.
come over to my house
you’ll find
half assed note books & papers discarded I’m a

messy writer between cold fried chicken fingers chocolates and ginger brew and endless coffee
pens everywhere a litter of literary endeavors most,
are shit
some abandoned left for dead
a few
abused
THIS IS A SHITTY POEM I WROTE
scrawled across the front
over there a gaggle of diatribes and collected lies
there a coven of yearnings and i’m transcribing now
and can’t read my own writing here so fill it in your fucking self alright?

am i mad and I’m writing or is the writing making me mad i’m writing

ah glories and hurried stories

huzzahs to my breakthroughs
and
humbled mornings
a dedication to my minds eye wandering down
trying to calm the corridors the host of my ghosts

steering them into little boxes where they will lie quietly waiting

to be released upon you some might even see the light of day not if i can help it

then occasionally a glimmer, a rhythm, a tone a..

” I’d been working in retail for 500 years”

get back to me on that its not been born yet its just pregnant.

others i leave too horrific to deserve awareness or sharing but

yes, i write . i write on. i write on everything everywhere
mcdonalds receipts and paper bags greasy brown napkins remember the cold fried chicken right?

and sometimes i even write them down but only when they call to me they command me they sing to me
worry me, push me to grab them up again and engage them
others
are meant to be burned no, that’s way too dramatic they aren’t that good

for a funereal pyre

to be left for all time in the recyling bin and made into cereal boxes into lucky charms

yeah

i write.

all the time
“( while pissing )

oh shit I forgot the last line

“i think i’ll i can go dancing now”

Whatever you do, don’t write.

Above all else DO NOT sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to keys DO NOT

pause to contemplate or
listen to the VOICE or talk to
your muse run, run run away, in the other direction in
ANY direction get a life, get two. Get lost. Have kids. Build a boat have
an affair get
drunk. Fight. Find an addiction but

I beg of you save yourself from the unrelenting agony the
pull like a magnet that draws you back and won’t let you go a
horror story unfolding quietly in your mind as you try desperately to

think of something ANYTHING to

occupy your time and
let the hours slip by unproductively but most importantly
unrecorded, unwritten, unresolved on paper or captured on disc because
if you don’t
or more to the point if you do
get started and

you ask yourself.. “What if…?”

and you find a pen and write it down on the back of a napkin start
scribblling in the car while stopped at a light on the way to the store or
trying to get to that all important appointment you know the one that will change your career which you desperately need since you’re sure not making any money writing and
you end up making the appointment and you get the career the
money the house the wife the love you’ve always wished for .. but,

IT WON’T MATTER!

Because all the while you’ll be thinking..

” How can I get away for just a little while ?”

and then slowly, irrevocably it will begin again and
you find yourself sucker into the vortex pulled
into the maw swallowed whole as the Moby Dick of your writing Jones grows and grows
quitely
inside you to
use you exhaust you expend you and toss you away an empty carcass on the rocks of some
forgotten beach all
for the pleasure ( ? ) the
satisfaction ( ? ) of knowing you let the

snarling tiger out of its cage and
as it bounds down the hallway ROARING at you and
LEAPS AS IT LUNGES FOR THE KILL YOU..!!!

you’re..still ..ah alive to tell the tale yourself you
finished. you
made it
to
THE END.
Only to do it all over again.

was at a  couple friends  b day party last night

very prosperous they are all well off and

love to recount their  dining  adventures and overseas  trips they,

some of my friends like to go on “exotic” trips,

the  more  obscure and risky the better  or  jump off cliffs and shit. me

I LIKE SOFT LANDINGS..

they call it… “adventure travel”…really ?

Adventure fucking travel is for bored fucking suburbanites who

want….ok, cool it Bob

who goes on “adventure travel anyways ? Me ?  No way… hey

ever hitchhiked at  16, clear across the USA,   just to get to school,

with like $50 and  a heavy  pack full of canned food?

AND THATS THE  THIRD TRIP THAT SUMMER BACK AND FORTH ALL THE WAY ACROSS on  my own ?

And  you are just grateful you didn’ get beat up  by the dusty pick up truck full of

red necks outside of Lincoln its  1972 and FUCKING FAGGOT hippies  like me are

NOT WELCOME in LINCOLN you WE”RE COMING BACK TA GET YOU !!!

they shout and

who were coming  around now for the THIRD time after  swearing, threatening  me the first time

and throwing  empty  brown glass bottles of  Bud the  SECOND TIME ..

CRRRASHHH !!  go the bottles breaking at my feet  TINKLE TINKLE as the glass  scatters  on the pavement around me sparkling in the dusty…. fuck it

and I am  frantically praying hopping up and down from side to side  OH MY GOD PLEASE  to ANY  god  you know or  don’t know in this case or one someone told you about on a previous ride “you can have anything you want just say NOM YOHO RINGYE KYO “ as  you watch their  truck slowly go  down the  VERY LONG RAMP and  circle round and over the underpass and coming back down your  ramp AGAIN and

“please please please pick me UP anyone !!! dammit ! NOM YOHO RINGYE KYO NOM YOHO RINGYE KYO NOM YOHO RINGYE KYO fuuuuck”  Yes!!! (And someone pulls off and you speed off looking back ARE THEY FOLLOWING ?) offers you some red wine and a short roach you are so FUCKING GRATEFUL  you want to  just hug the guy or cry

from relief..

“you do thank you thank you pffffft”

now down the road in Colorado

and camping out its cold your eating canned food and shit and

and

I’ve been camping up  Boulder Creek and can’t wait for the Grateful Dead show coming to town, Heck I CAN’T WAIT to see them never saw them at RED ROCKS  which was legendary  full of  SPIRITS sure they would play DARK STAR there and then

getting tonsilitis for the second time that summer after smoking all that hash on the last trip across and not eating and
“THATS A SEVERE  ABCESS IN YOUR THROAT YOUNG MAN,

GLAD YOU CAME IN” “uhm  …thank you “ and thank GOD the free clinic  has  anti biotics shit I EVEN HAD A TICKET ! and left it on the ride board for someone to find and hitch a  ride  with 2 skinny hippies in a white step van on  the ride board at U BOULDER who can take me ALL THE WAY ? !!! to the Bay area..? okay …via  LA ? Ohhh kay…..if I give them my “HOW MUCH YOU GOT ?”   $20 for gas… I do but keep $10 back for the road ..trip as its gotta last me what turns out to be  2 weeks but they  share their  food stamps with me so its okay other than  when I get to  Oakland and  I haven’t had a shower in like  WEEKS and my  hair is so matted  and I use my last dime to call my brother who picks me up by the free way  and when we  get to his  apartment he  pushes me into the  bathroom with  two towels and says

“ Don’t come out,

FOR AN HOUR”.

and when I do he sits me down and basically cuts off all  my hair off to like 2 inches cause its well wrecked an..i lost my brush some weeks back,  before Boulder and…

or  having to hitckhike  or  drive away  BACK to the EAST COAST after school lets out but am short on cash and can’t get  a hold of  mom in Mexico and my dad in frigging Vermont and he and I aren’t  really talking .. much, even though I am going back to live with him because well I dont know what else to do. At all.

So I sell 100 hits of some serious lucy at the DEAD concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley , don’t really remember much of the show  I was so set on selling the whole pack of  Mr. Natural blotter, heck this was work man and I did..sold all of it..what if i’d gotten popped selling acid at a dead concert would  NON YOHO RIGNYE  KYO have intervened again like she did on the border comin in from canada thank god they didnt find the speed and acid that time or that other incident in mexico with mom and the coca leaves or the  car I wrecked at 15 in florida or….shit…

adventure fucking  travel..?

I’ll take a quiet cabin by a cool running stream and 2 locks on my doors and a nice white fence and my trusty Volvo 240 saved my life  3 times no thank you HIGHER POWER GAIA for protecting my what was then my scrawny little hippie ass me, all those years alone really thank you…. adventure travel? shiiit

5  hours spinning

in the back room

outside nuremberg

dissing me “You’re on

2nd stage”  beat blurs

into dawn sleep

wake on the

autobahn onto

my next gig

here we come leipzig,’

lady J

my chauffeur,

she’s ‘

twice as cool

as me can spin, sing it

lay it out in  7

tongues , handle a gun

brooks no shit from any coked

out producer fools we

got

no sleep, hey its sweet

i’m a rock star baby

yeah its  a grind

5k a nite

its my life

hip  hop down the block

gonna never stop

festivals and pool halls

giant  clubs and outside a mall

curtis calls me come to brooklyn

drakes got my 40 g’s waitin

got some new tunes cookin

hey down we go

tryin to avoid the ho’s

morning after

my mind is shattered

weekend over

rest an relax

find my brutha’s

let the past go

like it never mattered

stop thinkin bout

in the window I spy

my mother

your worthless

no good

thanks dad

takes one to know one

i’m no shy

onto the next show

gotta a  studio gig

a tv spot

putting out a new  lp

goin for the top slot

chasin dreams=

ghosts try 2 catch me

I keep movin

they’ll never get me

gotta  stop let the curtain

down

get real drop the smile

beyon bein a clown

put the  ghosts to rest

get back to what

I do best

its friday again

flying 2  ibiza

i’m a  rock star

nothin sweeter

As the child and grandchild of Holocaust Survivors and a (Dual US) German citizen under Jewish Repatriation Basic Law 116

I am for a Free Palestine and for a truly democratic Israel, which currently doesn’t exist.

Shalom Aleichem

Bobby

 

The remark was tossed off  as casually as the ash

from her ever present Salem menthol’s,

“I almost committed suicide once“, she said,

“ when I was a teenager ”.

Coming off her exhale didn’t lessen the mind numbing shock

that stopped me in my tracks. After all

she was my mother.

“The subject”, or any part of it, and what lead to it

was never broached before that day in the early ’90’s.

We were  both sober by then. Painfully so.

Max, her father, had been incarcerated in the Buchenwald forced labor camp

not once,

but twice, in 1938.

Still they got out.

They were wealthy.

Max was a Wurstmacher.

Owned a sausage factory,

had even been a Kaiser guard.

Those sausages?  You laugh ? Go on,  laugh.

They saved our life.’

Grandmutter frantically searched for an exit for them and found one via

a bribed American official in Vienna.

Mein Grandmutter Betty? She paid him $10,000 in gold.    In 1938.

This allowed Max exit out of Buchenwald and the whole family’s

placement on that precious list, they left in late ’38,

right before the door slammed shut.

Unspoken all these decades, it effected mom, them, all of us

like a toxic underground waste stream flowing though our family

what seems like forever.

Until now.

I still remember my first comprehension of the Final Solution, I was, maybe 8 or 9.

We were at my grandparents beautiful apartment overlooking Lake Erie.

Max was dying of cancer and got sick during our visit so

I was shuffled off to the study, plopped in front of the television and left alone

while more immediate life and death issues were being attended to.

There was a PBS piece on the Camps on TV and suddenly,

I realized for the first time,

they were talking about us.

They were talking about me.

Jump forward,  2013.

Mom has died, except the memories, good and bad.

May she find peace beyond measure.

And now I, am a (dual US and) newly repatriated German citizen.

I had learned  of  my rights to German citizenship under Jewish Repatriation laws

and even though mom had avoided any interest  in pursuing  reparations I wanted this.

It didn’t end well for us, Mom & I,  I’m sorry to report.

This isn’t one of those , ( what I call ),  “happy Holocaust Survivor” stories where we overcame all our experiences and trauma’s and marched on into the sunshine, loving all, smiling and laughing. No.

More like the ongoing grey days in Cleveland, and Berlin, where sunshine is the anomaly, we trudged along.

Ingrid and I weren’t talking up until the day she died.

This wasn’t my idea, and frankly, the guilt was almost overwhelming.

I say almost because at least I was under the care of a therapist and psychiatrist, medication and even some volunteers and working a recovery program every day.

But now I had learned of Basic Law 116 that gives survivors of the Holocaust

and their direct descendants German citizenship.

“Really”, you ask?

Yes I wanted it.

Absolutely.

I did the research, and with the help of a survivor repatriation specialist, applied, and got it.

And so my wife and I visit Berlin, for the first time in 2013, and

this piece, their, our story came roiling out the first morning

of my first day in Germany,

as a newly repatriated German citizen.

An American Jew returning to Germany,  oddly, to feel safe.  To find my home.

This is my families true story.

A postcard from Buchenwald.

( May 23rd 2013 1.22 pm to 2.43 pm Berlin)

 

Ein Deutsch Post aus Buchenwald?

I….

shattered.

Nights cling

Crystallized hearts clutch a

cold fuzzy bedraggled little bear her

pavement splattered innocence frozen

 

“Sanctuary?   anyone?

 I beg you please, my family..

Please.. Anyone?“

Appeals unanswered bells

never tolled,

“We have gold. “

Now they listen.

We run we hide we pray we lie our

hearts decades frozen now plow through the

snow drift piled denial,

another Cleveland winter as

icycled hearts

“… Snap! “

74 years

SEVENTY FOUR YEARS…

” Snap!”   Like that …

The clouds parted fields come into view fields of Green fields of… Energievent?

Fields of …windmills? I can’t believe g** en himmel  my

very first view is energievent?

The windmills whisper
“we were awaiting your return”

smiling nodding their

long white jiggly arms

gently cradle healing breezes …

the little red book clutched his bedraggled bear

“My first time nein sprechin ze Deutsch, ein Amercanser”  he

smiles and shakes his head at me

taps the little red passbook as if to say

 “You? Are German? “

Shakes his head again unbelieving stamps me in

I smile and move on

I don’t care

I AM HERE NOW

my wife scolds him she DOES care SHE follows and scolds him

I DON’T CARE I am HOME now

Home now.

Home?

“I’ve never been here I tell you” home?  “yes home yes

you have been here yes home yes they whisper the clouds whisper the green fields whisper the silenced stacks whisper the trains whisper yes the curry vurst doesn’t whisper it shouts “Yes! you have.”  yes welcoming  leaving crystallized hearts  melting   here  join us  yes  leave your uber freedoms  now  slavish  yes leave the gorging that leaves you ever hungry still yes leave the  hearts carcasses yes leave the  sleep that doesn’t sleep  yes  you are here home now yes.”

“but I have never been here I tell you”

“yes YOU HAVE yes”  the energievent says “yes you have yes” the fuzzy bear the wet and bedraggled bear smiling button eyes winking says “yes you have yes she has they have you have we have yes it is as it should be yes but you, you yes you the Americanser  “Bob”, the German man child’s heart orphaned generations ago yes it is not always as it should be no and yes their hearts and homes were plundered again and again yes we are still this wounding yes now opened bleeding seeping some yes yes we chased you yes we are just now getting to you yes we now know you yes we will bury them together these ghosts”,

yes” our inner Yoda tells us,

“There is no trying “

“yes “

Our inner alcoholic says

“yes there is no crying”

“Yes “our inner child says,

“There is no lying

from our tortured selves”

“Yes, they followed you yes, they chased you down yes. these zombies stilled yes, there is a fire here warm your hands yes, let us incinerate these zombies you and I yes,  let us fill our hearts carcasses yes, let us warm our frozen hearts together melt them into energievent into windmills nein, there is no cold metal now clanging shut nein, there are no oven bricks and mortar no badges of shame that are honor no badges of honor that were shame NOW with us yes, no,  no rooms of shivering outcasts to die horribly yes, now join us now in life now yes,

come  back here to now with us yes, your steamer trunks of memory and pain we are welcoming unload them  yes, you can., unload and  empty them yes, here, the  tattooed numbers on their arms yes,  we remember them too the ladies @ the bakery smiling and pinching you sneaking  you a Rugelach you seeing the numbers tattooed on their jiggly arms yes,  and no one talking of it the numbers yes, let them  float away those numbers  yes,  those  emptied steamer trunks down the rivers yes, to rest and sleep yes , scatter the ashes the  frozen, discarded yes, and yes  there is  just this battered cup now this prayer  cup this Kiddish cup this heart  cup this  tear cup yes, that all that’s  left yes  THATS ALL THATS LEFT OF THEM  YES, just this battered cup  YOU brought this back you brought them back this battered  cup I carry

“Raise your glasses now “

raise your hearts now yes,

raise our hearts now yes we can yes you can  yes to this door open  gently gently yes,

it is okay to yes this yes  to bury the Final Answer yes,

yes to open the  wound and let it bleed and seep and  crust and  stain and heal  and scar and fade away then yes,  the scars will fade yes this door  this  card this battered cup these  fields this  dream this wind yes, this  little red book yes it is a healing yes they are here with you yes,

proud  ever  proud the Kaiser guard the sausage  maker the writer  muther grandmother ENVIRONMENTALIST MUTHER proud so proud yes, at your return yes,

heal her HEALER yes heals you yes, heal us heals them yes heals her yes,

their scattered scarred crippled battered frozen  burnt smothered  souls lift on windmills  on energievent on  yes we can change now the energy  forever yes,

they are wind yes they are  green fields  yes  they are  water they are ocean they are waves they are  here  now yes let them awaken now and let them  rest.  Yes …

   SNAP! “

The doorbell rings 

A letter plops on the floor..

A little girls heart clutching her bedraggled bear her hand clutching a bottle of poison, lye ….

“ein postkarte? aus Buchenwald?”

Unbelieving drops the lye bottle shatters now on the kitchen floor the poison seeping spreading but not in her now not her heart stopped already shattered yes her death wish yes shatters it stays quietly lurking a cancer on her heart decades gone yet she says again unbelieving

 “Ein postkarte aus BUCHENWALD?”

it says…

“mien liebchin I am fine.

 I’ll be home soon

wait for me

 mein goldsach

Wait for me.

I WILL BE HOME SOON I

PROMISE YOU I WILL.” 

I ask you how can a father promise this from a death camp?

Send a postcard from a camp of no exit I ask you this impossibility to arrive moments before she drinks the lye she would have drunk the lie that lie that is you are alone you are abandoned worthless less than nothing

Yet, he can.

Yet, he did.

I am here to prove it to you this day this

small well, not so small miracle.

Her heart swells again her hope swells again she smiles now …

  “…SNAP!”

Puffing her ever present Salem menthol’s

I am frozen to this spot that day long ago,

she says,

“Oh, I never told you that?

 How I almost killed myself then? “

“If it weren’t for the postcard arriving from Buchenwald…

puff …. puff….

“Oh.   Sorry. I thought I  told you that . “

My face painted ghost white with shock,

“No mom, you never told me that.”

……

yes you, I, we wouldn’t be here standing crying frozen battered now here now, she is gone too now but these she is with me she was  there her arms the windmills  welcomin  my environmental muther she

her memories of those moments now hardened into oven bricks grown cold now warmed by the healing the energievent yes I have her here now yes you are here now yes you I

have brought this battered cup home this prayer cup this cup of tears this

Kiddish cup yes now.

Yes.

Now.

You are home. Now yes. Now

I am home.  Yes.   Now.

We are home.

 

 

 

 

I’m watching Scorcese’s ” The Last Waltz” on a Monday  night @ the Rialto here in Raleigh with my  2 buds

Alan &  Bill, a few years ago.

Both artists & musicians, who had raved that this was  the ” greatest  concert film of all time “

and I’m digging  Robbie  Robertson & The Band, that’s ” The  Band” with caps, jamming with  Dylan & Neil Young  and  a bowl full of others come to say goodbye and that’s all fine and dandy  but

then  Joni  comes on with her beautiful lanky  overbite and she starts into” Coyote”

and ..

I start to cry.

It hits me..

I, I can’t believe I never saw this movie  it was filmed at Winterland in ’74  and I had left in June to live on a commune and we used to go see The Dead there all the time but that’s not it,  its her..

it..she .. she was my muse her weaving visual adventurous  lyrical  hearts breaking over  spilled wine and

wet mossy rocks on a foreign beach somewhere  her rhythms.. they

were mine. i mean mine were hers…

all this time  I’d been

she was my muse and I didn’t even know it.

okay when I divorced my wife  I would play  Blue something like  5 times  a day for months but thats obsession not  …and it was mostly her early work

pining about  James Taylor and  the lonely road and  an old  Greek lover stealing her camera  .

I needed to write her. I needed her to know so.. I wrote this  offer.

I later  saw her in an interview and  pulled back from this  goggle eyed  insanity I had  cooked up,

see  she’s one tough old  bird and  just wants to paint and smokes  like a chimney, swears like a sailor, brooks no fools & lets you know it.

Frankly I was intimidated

I mean they say  never meet your hero’s right and I didn’t  want to meet her okay of course I wanted to meet her hell i wanted to hop in bed with her even  if we  were as old  as pillars of salt

really  I just wanted her to know and to read a few pieces and i thought I’d pay for that privelege even if she never even answered

and  so the question  remains

do I send the letter?

see attached.

Bob

Greetings Joni,

I propose under the rules of piracy a parlay, to negotiate a trade.

20 minutes of your precious day, reading 5 poems,

from my website , ( www.Stillvertical.net)

for either $800 in cash, or silver or

the sum total negotiated and agreed upon

from the group of the following found objects and found art:

 

First a collection of lovely, intriguing seashells I

gathered from a barrier island here in Carolina,

where pirates abandoned horses

left to wander, some 300 hundred years ago.

 

You can choose them by gross measured quantity,

( a cup, a bowl, a tray or a bucket full )

the final amount TBD depending

on your cunning and wiles or

your heartfelt desire..

And most important

for the love of seashells,

which for me,

whether they are worn or shattered,

whole or worm eaten I

love them all as,

they are precious beyond measure  a

memory of a life and the art house they created.

 

This is a beach where few know to go,

stretching miles east and west, rather than the brother and sister islands

that run north & south.

 

The shallow sand bar offshore allows this precious cargo to be gently rolled through

the surf and plopped onto the beach in such variety and quantity it boggles the mind.

 

You may also choose by size of shell, those the size of your finger or less.

Or can fit in your hand or larger. Both can be found there.

 

The island where they were found is known as Shackleford Banks,

and can only be approached by a ferry that drops you in the water at

either end of its 9 mile long, lonely and lovely Shangri La.

 

If, upon arriving and wandering, you are lucky,

you may meet some horses or a crab. Nothing else,

except for shells upon shells, shells truly beyond measure.

 

This, is bliss.

 

Being of generous spirit I am also willing to part with

my cherished copy of

Auberine Woodward Moore’s

“ For my musical friend”  publ’d 1900 &, sigh,  I’m really stretching here….

a rock I decorated, from the streets of Berlin.

Now if that very amazingly generous offer is not enough I will consider parting with one of

2 ladybugs, one cloth, one metal.

 

The metal lady painted by my good friend George Le Chevalier. ( www.GLCart.com )

 

The cloth one is a pet I keep close for friendship and warmth

and would be heartbroken to part with

so I choose to withdraw it from our parlay.

 

And finally, if you,  ( & not your agent ), turn out to be a hard bargainer,

which I imagine you may well be as you seem to be a very tough old gal,

we can discuss other possible trades like good tobacco but, and I insist on this,

 

I will absolutely not give you my found art piece “Basquiat as a child”.

 

No. No. a thousand times no…well

unless you would trade me for one of yours like,  “Turbulent Indigo”.

until then,

be well.

if not

you will always be my muse, even from afar.

 

at the encouragement of many I attempted to get this too Joni through her manager who politely declined.

if you know of a way feel free to send this to her

 

So, I’m reading this story I found at the library

about a professional backgammon player

who meets a high school friend from Berkeley

while in Singapore no less, life is like that sometimes

 

And later in Berlin, one of my favorite places now,

the player he, passes out, while playing some old rich post Wall industrialist

who made a fortune buying up the real estate

before the Wall fell,

under the wall, for nothing.

 

He awakens, the player, in a hospital in Berlin, to find he has a tumor behind his eye

and he needs to go to San Francisco to see a doctor who can remove it

he has no money, and I mean NO MONEY,

and has avoided Berkeley since he grew up there

amidst the Revolutions that never happened

and the eucalyptus and the squalor and

this author he….

 

I lived in Berkeley as a teenager some summers ago when

 my parents had forgotten about me

or didn’t care or were in denial in their own head games

or just thought they didn’t know what to do with me

like pick up the phone and just fucking tell me to come home

send fucking bus money for god’s sake instead of this

“throw him in the pool and see if he can swim” parenting non-strategy

they seemed committed too  I mean would that have been so hard? To just pick up a phone

maybe try to actually find me? After school let out., you know? Like be there? As parents.

Apparently, yes,

It was too hard

 

And I would wake up

smoke some more Kickapoo joy juice in a spliff the size of a small cigar and head down to Pete’s

with my buddy, Jon Ruverol, son of a mother married to a Black Panther

Jon was all crazy laughs and blues guitars

and dreams of architecture school

he died, cancer, too long ago

Jon, you okay now up there where ever we go?

 

And I would wander down the avenue where Berit

my blond sunny California girlfriend’s mother Bonnie

worked in a poster shop on Telegraph,

and I’d eat falafel and huge chunks

of Swensen’s ice cream by the pint, more weed, more coffee I

found a book down there on the Avenue,

Indian tales.

Can I still say that and not give a fuck about politically correct okay?

 

A book of Cheyenne tales, SEVEN ARROWS it was called 

it was a circle that book it was THE CIRCLE that book

and a tale within it became my Talisman, my bible, my story.

About a mouse that goes on a journey afraid

of his own shadow but he goes, and he grows and he becomes his higher self

by letting go, by letting go of everything

I am on that journey now and forever will be

 

then that book? about the backgammon player?

He arrives in Berkeley and is greeted by sarcastic ironic love his

old caustic friend now rich on real estate U Cal hamburgers

and hippie paraphernalia and he, his old friend, gives him… everything.

Food, money an apartment and he even pays for his surgery all 7 figures and well,

as he walks around Berkeley…

 

I was there last summer visiting Bonnie in a nursing home

she had Alzheimer’s and said sure she remembered me

I knew she didn’t and didn’t really care

not like I didn’t “care” I just wanted to see her and thank her

when she let me stay after Junior and Senior years

she let me stay with her, Berit and I weren’t even an item anymore,

not that we were ever much of one to begin with but Bonnie, when my parents had forgotten

what it meant to be parents and when your son is thousands of miles away and school ends

you know in June right?

 

You’re supposed to pick up, call up, fucking do SOMETHING you know be parents

for god’s sake and well they weren’t

they didn’t. they were on their own trips man me? I …

Bonnie just said back then,

“Stay as long as you like, ’till you figure out where you want to go”

not like she was some hippie either

she was just like A NICE PERSON you know so

 

and people wonder why I did so much drugs?

I’m supposed to be over all this criminal neglect abandonment stuff now you know yeah

I know I’m repeating myself and even brought it up twice in this diatribe I’m 61 years on

now been in 12 steps for 30 plus years every addiction and compulsion known to humankind

was my friend at one time or another along this continuum.

decades I mean decades of

therapy, antidepressants no longer…yay!

Yeah,

I did the forgiveness thing and the prayers and all.

Guess well, this is as Jack Nicholson once said,

“This is as good as it gets.” For me anyways.

 

So I’m reading this book and I am back there

with this character and I can smell the eucalyptus

and the cool air in the evening and the sterile decadence that is Berkeley still today.

 

Have you ever read a book and it just,

it’s not even transporting, it’s just you are there in the book

and you are back in your life and the author has so thoroughly captured the whole moment

of your life and his and it’s the same sad ,sweet, dying melancholy of those moments?

 

I went back to see Bonnie last summer in two thousand and sixteen.

Went to a book fair, ate these huge grilled oysters and went to an AA meeting on the

north side,

and cried my eyes out

now sober for so long I’d almost forgotten how much weed was my lover

and my best friend I said ALMOST forgotten,

but not quite still wish, still loved it as it loved me I

just wanted to thank her for being there, Bonnie,

like almost no one was back then and

she didn’t even barely

she didn’t even know me and it didn’t matter see,

I’d called her a few years before but couldn’t make ti across the Bay I

felt the sadness in her voice so, this time,

cause see,

I just had to see her, and thank her, for being such a nice person to me,

and let me stay with her,

and thank her,

and I did.

She didn’t remember me.

Even if she said she did.

But it didn’t really matter.

I just wanted to thank her.

I brought her flowers. And I did.

I was dreaming again it was that

San Francisco ride again the

imaginary highway this time going north

the familiar fantastic stretch where

life unfolds in a  sparkling vision soft  green carpeted  hills fallen

crumbling into

chasms of sea otters and waves roaring their final descent

I.  Am.  Here!!! & my  verdant golden destination a

slurry of grandfathers summer cottage perched on a bluff above a

ravine in ohio and

my our final hideout our arrival our ultimo refugio once more clean

and safe

all mixed 2 gether

in california  in my  mind wandering again

not the  one where I cross the bridge to the  east bay

this one a

house on a bluff

on the beach impossibly

ragged and grande

set on the edge of

near the Park

and a mother no grandmother

having breakfast of

granola and big muffins

5 wait 7 or 8 kids with her I counted them

a long stretched out veranda of old wicker and bouganvelia

winding impossibly through everything it had had time

to be overgrown this is wealth beyond all  understanding

she was regaling them of some mundane

thing they sat rapt

picking at their muffins as teenagers always do

embrassed to b there and loving every minute

she was ‘

the house  like an old  b & b that was not yet

one and

overlooking  bluffs and the sea in an impossibly

beautiful place on the edge of the  park and san francisco

where this simply  should not exist except  in a  dream

now its what the  b & b ?

others having  great full healthy breakfasts talking while eating

“well you know she said…” inanities but  i’m not part of  them just

passing through

keep going on mayb I’ll find a take out place a  white bag a

sandwich or or

why was I the only one  not with others

these themes recurring

the venues  different  each time

family together

me, alone

crossing over

or jumping in cars with strangers

“how far you going ?”

“Hey…”

“going my way?”

“i’ll keep you up. Really “

i’ll regale you

“ hey  believe me”, smiling

“you won’t fall asleep,

believe me  you won’t want to”

mayb I won.t  get raped this time

Or the commune where I landed @ 16

communes I

just wanted to b part of

something, anything

I could believe in that

could believe in me

I was tired so tired from the searching the searching

And I was 16. when I woke up

I was 63

 

 

There was something about her dress she came out wearing it
entranced me it nagged me,
until this morning after my first coffee sparked my fumbling mumbling cloudy mind it
looked like a flapper’s dress but made of strips of… paper? Ribbons maybe ? And
wait, I got it Tina Turner ! When she would sing “Nutbush City Limits” and shim shim shimmy across the stage well
Grace doesn’t just shimmy man she rocks it she hops it she bounces barefoot she occupied that iconic look like
it was justa summer frock she slipped on..
Well that’s a start for one hot momma yes momma she has a 3 year old who is touring with
her I mean who is Grace Potter ?
Can she keep this up for two hours or more? Can I? Can everyone?
Everyone says she is insane live And I’m starting to see they aren’t even close to describing this

blonde bombshell rocketship to the musical stars

What past life karmic musicology crossed with what DNA that created this wonder
this apparition this Niagara Falls of talent pouring out and down on us ?

joy pure unadulterated joy I say

Growing up ( part time ) in Vermont, in the 60’s and 70’s summers
I’d to go to summer stock theater with my dad, he
who among other things a theater critic,
( Bennington , Marlboro, Dorset and Woodstock )

and when we got home after a show and I headed for bed he sat at his typewriter
with his silver thermos of coffee enough to charge him up all night to write his review,
which he would then drive to deliver to the Bennington Banner before dawn yes,
those were the days of typewriters, hard copies and hand deliveries 30 some
miles away to make deadline.
Those were the days before Ben & Jerry’s Vermont when I would be the only longhair
at Burr and Burton the Manchester high school drawing from 15 miles away and getting beat on by
the townies as I walked down the hall

Dad, he tended to be a vicious critic and that was hard but tonight as I sit here at 12:30 am
having witnessed something truly transformational by a native Vermonter who doesn’t
have a bad bone in her whole body and remarkably, there are enough good triggers
I am thinking of him and a tribute to her and well anything that makes me look back at
the train wreck that my relationship with my dad became before we said our sad goodbyes
and Vermont which I loved the way it was back then well that’s just dandy see

I am an exile from those glorious Green Mountains
my fathers family called home for over 200 years but Grace,
Grace brought me home.

unlike him this will be a glowing review a review of towering unmistakable
one of a kind talent that I now chalk up to one of my 3 lifetime musical regrets
1) That I missed my one shot to see Bob Marley in Cleveland I was sick that night and had a great date with Lisa this
tall tall blonde bombshell maybe that’s where part of the Grace infatuation
comes in more unrequitted infatuation more pc inappropriate heterosexual blonde obsessions
on my part yes I’m old and a sucker for beautiful blonde talent
and a love addict, so sue me. Others have already so get in line.

and next the second regret when I froze up in the 8th row and missed my chance to dance on stage with
Prince at the RBC center just a few years before we lost him too and now my third and
only regret I missed the first 10 or 15 years of her career
and “by jesus !’ ( Vermont vernacular) she’s a Green Mountain Gal (Vermonter ) too because if I had maybe
I would have abandoned my broken marriage years before abandoned my socially conscious career
and like my wandering high risk youth semi homeless Dead head teen years I would have travelled anywhere to hear her
and the amazing camraderie the amazing collection of folks who are were happy to play with her whether
it was the Stones or Jackson Browne or Lucius or Marcus King of Bob Weir or Kenney Chesney or Willie Nelson or Daryl Hall
its like

when I discovered Sean Costello, a one of a kind blues prodigy playing a monday night in Fat Backs bar bq in Buckhead in Atlanta and I swear I thought Eric Clapton was there until he played Robert Johnson no he WAS Robert Johnson or both and who died tragically
at a very young age and on my birthday no less but tonight no tonight
Grace is alive and well and worrying about approaching 40 and I am for one am
humbled and grateful

that SUPERSTARDOM has not put her on the map performing and headlining in stadiums
which she’d done leading in for other greats like The Rolling Stones and The Allman Bros.

I’m glad because well,

I’m greedy.

and I can see her and experience every molecule of her precious being up close and don’t have to share her with millions yeah,
she’s that good

Grace is from Burlington or there abouts I believe and has even created her own Northern Vermont Music festival
I mean I’d follow her off the end of the earth or off a cliff.. wouldn’t you ?

Why ?

Grace Potter is everything.

Amazing talent as a singer, performer and songwriter and a genuinely REALLY nice person who loves her life and is well incredible.
And that and she is drop dead gorgeous knows it is super super into it without being full of herself fully occupying her power her presence her talent
her sexuality I mean a woman who can play “Long Black Veil”, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Do ya Think I’m sexy”4
well..wow and nails all 3 well thank you Lord Jesus, Shiva, Gaia and Buddha combined man this is
transcendent rock n roll the old kind the original kind the kind that washes away all reason and brings you into
bliss and joy more joy then you’ve had in a very very long time and by…
I don’t even know Steven Tyler and Janis Joplin’s love child ?

So I was a “leetle’ worried as I had fallen hard after hearing “Paris Ooh La La” 12 years alte I had some cathcing up to do and Midnight is a great fucking album all of it and Mother Road just out wow.

And I’m am a Garce Potter newbie just a few months ago only to learn a LOT of people had heard of her.

Where was I ? lost in a crumbling traumatic codependent marriage gone bad? Why Yes a matter of fact exactly

lost ? Yes but now I’m found praise jesus and pass the glow in the dark squiggles everyone is wearing tonight including yours truly

so when I got slapped upside the head after hearing Paris I literally immediately went out and bought $300 VIP Passes and only regretted I couldn’t first go see her in Greensboro or Myrtle Beach right before and booked three nights in Beaufort

The world is such an amazingly dense place of different genres and talents that even someone like me
a dj, dancer and music enthusiast could somehow have missed her
hell I missed Michael Fronte’ too ! And right now post Covid everyone is out touring and partying
hard before another hammer comes down on all of us and well, me too.

So it was with some anxiousness and trepidation I booked the VIP pass for the Beaufort Music Festival as soon as
I heard she was headlining there as its one of my favorite places on the planet..

And she did not only NOT disappoint she really seriously blew my mind and I would put this performance in my top 10 over the last 50 years next too Prince’s Purple Rain tour yeah I’m that old, Bruno Mars in Vegas, some Dead Shows and Third World in NYC and Genesis with Peter Gabriel maybe close to Elton John at DAR Hall in DC after Yellow Brick Road

See its one thing to be famous and everyone knows your work
something else when someone can play songs you’ve never heard and hook you in over and over and that is just what Grace did.

She doesn’t seem too concerned about superstardom and is clearly in control and doing what she loves with people she really enjoys playing with and for and clearly enjoys herself hell goes wild too and well she is just fucking amazing and

rocks the house like no ones business

and I can stand 4 people from the stage and witness this glory.

I’m just going to give you a taste here of her last set

as she is known to play an amazingly diverse selection from one night to the next while also covering her hits and better known pieces lke

Medicine

Stars

Paris ooh La la

You and Tequila ( written by Deanna Carter and performed not tonight with Kenny Chesney )

she also played her own new

Mother Road

Rose Colored rearview

or that she’s played with

the Rolling Stones, Allman Bros, Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne and Daryl Hall

but here are some of the others she’s covered recently

Bill Withers Use me

Long Black Veil by The Band

Rod Stewart Do ya think I’m sexy

Atlantic City Bruce Springsteen

Friend of the Devil – Grateful Dead & performed with Bob Weir

Even Whole lotta love – Led fucking Zeppelin and
some Hendrix when you can come down off Cloud 9

stop and think about the range that requires the cajones to pull those all off which she does

or that she had Jackson Browne, Lucius and Marcus King BACKING HER UP singing HER SONG

“Each other” on the Late Show

Not that she’s short of her own excellent material heck she has 5 albums

Set List shows her covering

the Bee Gees, the Beatles, Beyonce, the Black Crows, Black Sabbath, Blind faith ,
Blondie, David Bowie, Boys to Men, Buffalo Springfield , Burt Baccarat
I already said Bruce and Browne and that’s just the “B’s”

I’m a pretty damn talented DJ and I know how to mix genres like nobody’s business
but this..

I mean I love this woman… my god

so what did she play tonight? well

after doing a huge set of her own that rocked the house

she ends with

this is her last set no lie

White Rabbit -Jefferson Airplane pure psychedelic rock totally original version

Paris Ooh La La, her own blows everyone away we all THE WHOLE CROWD just freaked..
the fuck OUT

Sweet Dreams – Eurythmics slow mysterious deep

When Doves Cry-Prince she plays electric piano while her guitarist shreds it

also her drummer and bass are women too both outrageous then

a snatch of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti from 19 fucking 55

I want to point out she kept talking about going to be 40 soon I Mean Lil Richard?
Then..

a snatch of The First Edition’s 1967 “ Just dropped by” ( better known as
“ to see what condition my condition was in” )

keeps joking about playing Freebird and kinda of apologizes
while acknowledging the Arkansas roots in her bands guitarist

then tells the back story for her new insanely great

“Lady Vagabond”

( here is her “back story for the song” as explained by her )

“ I’m a teenage runaway who ends up with a family in Ecuador and the paterfamiilia is a famous Matador who goes on an Iahuasca psychedelic journey and decides he can’t kill bulls anymore and frees them all”…! ) ….. Hunh ?

the song is insanely ( okay I’m going to stop saying fucking and insanely I promise I am just running out of superlatives here )
great and they said it was only the second time
they’d played it live and the crowd went wild

no I mean WILD

I mean NO ONE IN THIS CROWD has even heard It as the album was released last week and you can’t even get it yet and here we are hearing it and its epic and we’re singing along ? !!! and totally getting down ? !!

then she ends with her own

oh and she has played electric fender rhodes piano and live piano, three different guitars
dances her ass of all barefoot and then puts on a sparkly black cape coat for

Stars
again I’ve never heard it and I am almost in tears..

My only regret that I couldn’t be following her like I did the Grateful dead for 10 years back in their glory days the 70’s and 8o’s

Someone please someone start recording her live albums my god

how am I even going to be able to sleep?

Answer.. I didn’t. I wrote this instead and now its 2 am

 

 

FADE IN:

Dionne Warwick’s WALK ON BY plays over credits.

INT. DAY. PAUL AND DELIA’S BEACH HOUSE
Late afternoon, sound of the sea ROLLING ashore floats through an open window.

PAUL ( V.O.)

I once wrote a poem about my family, I called it “War”.

INT. PAUL AND DELIA’S BEDROOM
Close up of a woman’s face, DELIA JORDAN, gently SMOOCHING a face we can’t see. The scene is suffused with a childlike wonder.

PAUL ( V.O.)

I’ll always remember a few things about war. A cold winter night round ‘72, snow piled on the roof slides off with a roar.

She LAUGHS mischievously tossing her hair.

PAUL ( V.O.)

I barely stir and back into my warm covered slumber I go…

We can’t tell if it’s between two lovers, or a mother and child.

JUMP CUT TO:

INT. DAY OUTSIDE CLOSED COUTROOM DOORS
Several bored reporters and photographers come alive as someone sneaks out to tell them it’s over.

PAUL (V.O.)

Only to be awakened by commotion and someone, Dad, frantically grabbing….

As a panicked 30 something PAUL PHIPPS BURSTS through the courtroom doors he’s assaulted by FLASHING cameras and SCREAMING reporters.

PAUL (V.O.)

…picking me up through the door carrying me downstairs, mumbling wide eyed, sweat pouring off his body…

Running down the hall trying to shield his face he’s pursued by the pack…

PAUL (V.O.)

… we race down the corridor, to the living room where bewildered stood my brother and stepmother…

A very frightened teenage girl, TERRY CLAYMORE is led from the courtroom by a juvenile services officer.

PAUL (V.O.)

…and Dad screaming “JUMP!”.

She cringes as she is placed next to her father, tall, distinguished SENATOR WINSTON CLAYMORE.

PAUL (V.O.)

Then off he goes to save the others from a plane that’s on fire in his mind…

The Senator watches Paul with disgust and satisfaction. A lone reporter, DRAKE GREENLEY, observes Paul and the senator as…

PAUL (V.O.)

….in a war gone for over two decades before I’ll always remember those few things about war.

…a flashbulb goes off in Paul’s panicked face.