Dialing in the Verities

The dispatches come winging in

edged like razors                                                                              

glinting with myth & mystery

against a campy background of

German expressionist noir shadows

and filched from the muse known as

Our Lady of the Woolworth’s

where I sat as a kid in 1960’s America

surrounded by Dick Tracy comic citizens

at the Edward Hopperesque lunch counter

eating a grilled cheese sandwich

with a few slices of limp dill pickle

and a cherry Coke that hurt my teeth

unaware of the many different gambits

and puzzling opening moves

that would be plied upon my person

by those who meant “good”

or something they considered as such

in all the years to come

unlearned in the nomenclature

of the “outside” and the “other”

be it Spicer’s or Rimbaud’s

oblivious to all the crippling desires

and their attendant disappointments

that would eventually train my ears

to ruthlessly comb the ether for the

one true frequency

that sliced through all the others.

A Poem for St. Pauli

            The breath that fuels me

wants to take me

            somewhere else again

& I heave myself up

out of my car—

            boot-leather slapping on

red-light district cobblestones

on my way down to the harbor

                        of Hamburg

where oblique light

            & Rothko colors abound—

Is that a pistachio-hued

vintage Mercedes 290 SL

hardtop-convertible pimpmobile

generously trimmed with

            polished chrome

parked in front of that bordello

that I’m pretty sure is Polish—

or must all realizations

                        constantly be born

into a language

            & some splenetic stream

of continuous interior dialogue

between one self

& another?

A Poem for Dialecticians

Driving the roads and reading the signs

neat green rows of cabbage and horseradish

stretching to the coast of the cold North Sea

seeing the huge refinery in Hemmingstedt

glinting in the crooked light of December

as bleak and desolate as Antonioni’s Red Desert

miles and miles of piping and manifolds

clouds of vapor rising from the cooling towers

stacks topped with wavering flares of flame—

for the weak of heart perhaps a demonic vision

for pale poets cruising the unnatural world

a site of comprehension there at the confluence

of the innerworld and the ultraworld

where form trumps emptiness

and emptiness trumps form

in a perpetual cycle of realization

where perception becomes a reason to be alive

and a song to be sung in a key not yet found.

Yes I Did

I saw a Japanese sky above Germany

yes I did just outside the window of my

melancholy Leonard Cohen kitchen

yes I did with stark black naked leafless

tree limbs juxtaposed as crooked zigzag

haiku brushstroke silhouettes against the

austere cold azure of a crisp winter morning

in frosty Schleswig-Holstein swirling with

Van Gogh moods and emotions and contrary

and anomalous and curious as a minimalist                        

Richard Brautigan poem yes I really did.