song of the stoned gambler, revised

would-be Vallejo
first goattee I knew well
zapata must've had hair like your's
black, shiny, full, hanging down
below your neck
a revolutionary understanding
for a middle class boy
from upstate Illinois (Dixon/Mt. Sterling)
would-be Vallejo
polishing rocks in time's stream
carving moments on your lover's thigh
disappearing from the poker game
eliciting oral sex from my ex-wife
rehearsing hard-edged ambitions borrowed
from your greek twin
who's own fate staggered through
a series of deaths
would-be Vallejo
your Goddess came and changed your definitions
of goats and soups the scrabbled
games of accusation and meaning
you couldn't understand her daughter
your culture cut you off at the knees
down under it there was always
some smoke the words like beetles
crawling through the Aztec mosaic
you made of your brain
what isssssss /it a............llll
about? strange middle class king
of ancient aboriginal cultures
lurking now a thousand years
along the trail of dissonance
some spaniards brought Jesus for the
Virgin of Guadalupe to give birth to...
paranoid, commented, chained
to the bottom of a dinette set seat
every meal casting off dark gases
in the shroud of living and dying
would-be Vallejo you were never
in prison for the love of a beautiful
girl or for revolutionary times
surely you have awakened by now
given up the old story
admitted the rapes of your youth
the failures of your would-be poems
nothing will solve the crossword
except truth, something to choke
on. Her words exist still as mist
in a country of light.

Ric Amezquita turned me onto the peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo and his great masterwork, Trilce. That book had a profound effect on me, though not the same way it did on Ricardo. Amezquita had a good friend, Tony Kallas, dark, greek, smart, who wrote like Charlie Bukowski. And Ric had first an affair with Becky Bradway, while his longterm girlfriend, Rosie Richmond was trying to make a new life in California. He did like to smoke a lot of pot and play poker. He wasn't very good at it, but like all those Hemingway-esque writers at that time he pretended he knew what was going on. This piece posits Rosie as the Goddess in Ric's life. She was, yet he could never quite accept that and they never successfully lived together for very long. Ah well. I do think this version is much better than the original version, published in this blog in 2005. Tell me what you think, anyone?

folk music, revised

the redheaded kid
in his banjo'ed rhymes
we met at the apocalypse
or maybe appomattox
one time or the other
brandishing our signs
free willie his bumper sticker read
but his courage was an intricate vessel
shaped by someone else's hands
on the spinning wheel of what he had
betrayed. he left me and the sands
outside of time for the crated
job of rhetorical memory.
all stories inhibit;;; at least
I think that's why
he juiced his last newton,
flailing in the monster world, the
shoggoth's motorcycle betrayal, riding
up and down the beach doing
some pretty disturbed numbers
(he was) rung on the wheel of self deceit
gary adkins, will adkins,
how are you now?
are you dead in the water?
are you lost, without memory?
I found that Madeline
L’Engle book the other day,
with your inscription:
friends forever artists
in America. I see you now,
a snow angel in my memory,
a foggy mountain breakdown
lisping through the Lady's
sacred rhyme, your arms and legs
akimbo, your great goofy smile
reminding me that funny is just
excess fun the catastrophe still pursuing
you around your vodka tonic the ghost
of your unborn child reading through
your manuscripts wondering when
it is their turn
never, I suppose