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?

To Rosie

you never blamed me
recognising my weakness as normal, human
with your bridge gone now
I guess I won't see those people anymore.
So much loss, so many of us
slipping further apart.
The air on south grand is a faint perfume
in my memory. I lived there, an irony
in 1981 ... those perfumed cigarettes
mixed with Ricardo's cannabis.
You would never fold your cards,
even when it made sense.

The Universe is too damn random.
My fourteen year old son told me that.


This poem was written after Rosie Richmond died at the end of February, 1994. Rosie lived for many years in the building at 117 South Grand where Pat and I lived in 1980-81. She moved in long after I had moved out and ended up living with Bradway. Rosie and Ric Amezquita used to come over and play poker with us at the long dining room table that Pat had acquired. These games usually featured Ross Hulvey and sometimes I think JW, and various other diverse denizens of that scene. They alway featured vast quantities of marijuana. Ric liked to believe he could handle it better than anyone else and so felt it was an advantage to him. He lost consistently. One time my son, Joel, won seven hands in a row and got Ricardo riled up. Perhaps because Joel was like 10-11 at the time. Joel's quote about the randomness of the universe is from the trip to New York city he made in 1985, to see me and Becky when Becky was in the grad school at Columbia. He turned fifteen in August that summer, right after he was with us in Manhattan.

Rosie smoked these awful clove cigarettes (I think they are from India) and they smelled plenty. And they were strong. She had quite a sense of personal style that girl. I miss her plenty, as do many other people. As predicted in the poem I had little to do with the feminist cabal after that. BB had left the Coalition. I would occasionally see Polly Poskin. I noticed on tv recently that Polly is the president of my old neighborhood association in Springfield, Harvard Park. I was the secretary for the group for many years, mostly because I had a computer and a laser printer.

In 1987 when J. decided to make people decide whether they were my friend or not over what happened in 1979, Rosie absolutely remained my friend and often came over to Becky and mine's house on Bryn Mawr. And while she lived and ran Brainchild we would occasionally have shared readings. I published several of her stories in the Writer's Bar-B-Q. She was quite the funny writer. I still have a manuscript of Duffy Jo, her comic western novel, and also Fifth Position, her roman a clef of life in Springfield in the 1980s. A wise and funny piece. Rosie and I didn't always see eye to eye, but I loved her anyway. When you love someone that way you forgive their weaknesses and their mistakes. That is how you can tell who your real friends are.

song for the stoned gambler

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
would-be vallejo
polishing rocks in time's stream
carving moments on lover's thigh
disappearing from the poker game
eliciting oral sex from my ex-wife
telling hard-edged ambitions borrowed
from your greek twin who's own
fate staggered thru a series of deaths
would-be vallejo the Goddess
came and changed your definitions
of goats and soups the scrabbled
games of accusation and meaning
you couldn't see 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 a 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 and the
failures of your would-be poems
nothing will solve the crossword
except truth, something to choke
on. Her words still as mist
in a country of light.

Duffy Jo

she was a bronco buster dead now her camera
level smile genuine in an endless loop of careful
scary optimism what ifs piled up in the dreams
of a new york city life she didn't think she could
actually inhabit her brown mexican boyfriend a tragedy
himself delimited in dekalb married now to her
old friend a desire to hold the past into infinity

her words leaked out in a widening river she
held out hope for her women friends even as
she hid them from the sharp waves of
asshole boys like craig mcgrath, or me, or even
poetry-fraud from cincinatti

a long way away now I hear you Rosie
what did you want to know
how could you learn to leave
where is fidel not in those arms now I tried to find
you at the cemetery where the angel turns
you were a true friend when peggy betrayed me
you knew forgiveness for so many and for yourself
you walked the fond strange walk,
the dance of the unabashed
and carol and polly hid you from the street and
took your hand and named a building after you
all confused by the sudden departure

And I don't think of you as gone, myself. There's your
face in my mind, laughing. Pretty much always laughing.
You definitely know what's funny; its all funny, isn't it?

Rosemary Richmond was a stalwart of the lit scene in Springfield, Illinois from the mid-1970s through her death in 1994 at the age of 49. Rosie and I did not always get famously along but we did get along, and we did respect each other and come to love each other over the years. She had a weird feminism that seemed fairly realistic except every once in awhile when she went over the top. She wrote a pretty great story about a group of women taking a vigilante approach to a man they all knew who date-raped women. What made it a Rosie story was that on the one hand the protaganist really wanted to kill the sob, but she also was totally against the idea. Someone said that a true genius could hold completely different concepts in the mind and believe in them equally and this was certainly true of Rosie.

For many years, and in an off and on again fashion, Rosie had a love affair with a man named Ricardo Mario Amezquita. Ric was a long time member of the Scarritt scene. He was in Knoepf's second poetry class. He played a lot of poker with us and we all smoked a lot of pot that Ric acquired. His best friend was a handsome greek man, Tony Kallas, who fancied himself the next Charlie Bukowski. Both Ric and Tony were very talented writers, but neither of them produced enough to get past the fact that they were not academics. Tony published a number of poems, and a chapbook in the sangamon poets series, Rock River Suite. Ric also published a chap, Eating Stones. He sold it door to door in his hometown of Sterling, Illlinois.

Rosie gave BB her first job in the land of the hardcore feminists. Rosie hired her at the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, ICADV. They were located on South Fourth Street in those days, in an old yellow victorian. Rosie worked for Barb the Shaw until Barb let her go. A weird experience for all concerned. By then Rosie was living in Cheryl Frank's old house on Washington. Rosie had originally moved into the house Pat and I had shared with Gary Adkins and Gael Cox until my relationship screwed things up and I had volunteered us to move, so the other people wouldn't have to. Later on Cheryl and her kids moved into the apartment next door to their house, and Rosie moved into Cheryl's old house, and Barb Shaw moved into the house I used to live in. So many aspects of my Springfield life worked like that. What was it Pat used to say?? The Lobster Quadrille, change partners and dance.

Memory's Song

Seeking memory the second verse in the song
Partial lyrics painted across the valley an orchard
Of songs melodies implicit in the under
Standing beneath the waterfalling hours
Some young women in harmony one already
Lost to the cold river taking us away.

If life is loss and grief
(and it is, it is)
then memory is the coin
passing hands and a sudden
sight of you in the rearview
mirror is a true gift.

Daddy and Momma and Rosie and George Painter
This is ten years later but you are still bright in the dark
Sky I see when I lie down, determined not to join you
Just yet. Your words in my papers, your image on
A videotape from first night.

Seeking memory. I
Don’t wish to relive that time.
Only not to lose it.
Not to lose you.

Spaulding Gray found it out: this consciousness stuff
Isn’t worth a crap without a decent retrieval system.
Don’t forget that

NOTES: The first stanza is based on that song about "don't go chasing waterfalls ..." by a three girl group, one of whom is now dead. The members of the list are all people who passed in the same one year period nearly ten years ago now. Spaulding Gray, the monologuist, was in an accident in Ireland and lost some of his ability to recall his life. That was essentially the basis of what he did. Earlier this year he apparently jumped off a ferry in the harbor at NYC and drowned. They eventually recovered his body. I saw Spaulding Gray here in CU at Krannert several years ago. He did a monologue called "Slippery Slope" ostensibly about learning to ski. A great deal of the story revolved around his changing his life completely and having a child at the late age of 53. His story encouraged me to have my own late child. I am sorry for him that he had to leave, but I honor his choice. I am very sorry that Rosie and George Painter both had to leave; they were only 49 and both were fine writers and sweet, valuable human beings. My dad, I believe, left of his own volition. My mother fought until the end. I remember you all and keep your words in my files and read you when I can. I spent a good deal of yesterday reading through all the cards and notes I received from Jane Morrel in the fourteen years I knew her.