Normal…

... Normal
was always right around the corner
-- a 50's drugstore --
milkshakes for a quarter -- black
coffee in thick white mugs --
white boys in duck tails
pouring Crown Cola 
over black girls in white dresses --
newsreels just couldn't do it justice -- even
colorized years later --
the shock of red  -- how
you never saw their faces
in the same light again -- how
every year the price went up -- how
the trouble was never quite 
good enough
      to stop
the endless rewinds
the multiplication of names
on marble walls

Moved … ready to make art again ?






16 years ago, as Katrina was devastating NOLA and the Gulf coast, I moved into a first floor flat on the 1300 block of Morris in South Philly. I was there for 7 years–longer than I’ve lived anywhere since. A neighborhood dense with poets. I had a front porch, and a nice little garden. My walking stick spouted feathers and ribbons and can tabs. I made a Poem Tree on E. Passyunk. Wrote hundreds of poems. Both my son’s lived nearby in South Philly. We’d hang out at Lucking 13 at night, where Ben was the chef. Then the poets moved away. Ben and Gil left South Philly. Caught up in Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Philly. In 2012 I moved to the Ox. For Woody Guthrie’s centennial birthday, I walked to NYC with the OWS Guittarmy. When I came back, I began to make art again–after almost 40 years. Each year since, has been more difficult. Not likely I’ll live another 16 years, maybe not another ten. Fifty-five years ago I sat on a second floor porch of our apartment in Wichita, daydreaming about what was to come… about to set off for Philadelphia on our Vespa 150 motor scooter. Late August, early September. Leaving Bass Lake at the end of the summer. It’s always been a season of endings, beginnings. This year… I think I’m running out of new beginnings.