From the balcony off of the Monarch Hotel – Geary
San Francisco
I watched the mist shroud the Bay and the Bridge
As if the ghost of the Beats was blowing smoke rings
Through the cantilever girders .
Below, Alcatraz is as sexy as an English Public School
Standing marooned and indomitable
The city wakes covered in wet fog
Like a ‘bum’ stirring in the park
Covered in morning dew and piss
The Homeless shelter opposite the hotel
Leaks misery and despair onto the sidewalk
And the poets of the Fifties/Hippies of Haight Ashbury
Fight over a bottle and a fix
Their yesteryear poetry spilling from a trash can
Yet I paid $5 to see Janis Joplin’s leather trousers
Paul Kanter’s plectrum and Bill Ham’s psychedelic light slides
In a 60s Museum of the Castro
Felt like a bored man in an antique shop
Dodging a rain shower
Robert Creeley told me once “Was it all worth it?”
I said “I don’t know, you tell me.”
Remarks like hands in pockets
I went back into my hotel room
That smelt of mould and archived sex
One internet reviewer had complained of the hotel that
“there was a crack pipe in the sink and hookers doing business on the stairs”
I found no pipe or passed hookers on the stairs
But I wrote these short poems in homage to Robert Creeley
1) Sex
Perfect
I’m feeling like a choc-ice
In the sun
2) Life can be easy!
My toothless Polish Gran
Ate apples
Chopped them into small pieces
Took them like a tablet
Balanced on a blade
Couldn’t live without her apples
Her big grin stretched across the
Hole where her ‘chops’ should have been
3) Kingfisher chicks
Are incredibly ugly
(Check it out)
All beat-up looking
In little leather jackets
Caught in the rain!
Huddled together like punks
Around a mic
Reminded me of Ian Drury
But I guess I was stoned
When I was looking
At the photos
4) Some event in space
Has me
Contemplating existence
With an astronomer
All that SPACE
Makes you feel VERY small indeed
That’s a shock
Infinity caving in
Black Holes and all that scary shit
Dying in a black hole
Robs you of last minute thoughts
Let alone final words
That’s a mindfuck
Make you feel in an existential way
Like a penis shriveling up after the bath water goes cold on you
5) Robert told me you can “meet your soulmate on a bus’
Just like that
The guy next to me says that bees are secret FBI recording devices
And the plants in the park are antenna
His breath smells of beer, fags and rotten teeth
And our souls bump together but fail to connect
I leave the bus before my stop
Chased by saxophone chords and bees
“The question clear, the answer deep,
Each particle, each instance a reality,
A bird call shrills through mountain dawn:
Look where the old master sits, a rock, in Zen.”
Soto
.
Malcolm Paul
Picture Nick Victor
.