Away From Bogs
and from swamps, dog days
and the buzz and yap
to shirk unrest and malaise
beyond failing precincts
beyond the limited self
to bright havens we go
in search of herbs, curatives
in forests, meadows, fields
to seek rest and peace
to put awareness on pause
Greeting Card
Too soon summer falls to
winter and leaves us
before spring again trickles back
into summer
Long, hot days shorten; nights lengthen,
our world ebbs
as sun, earth, and moon stream in
fixed progress
You are not getting older, you
are seasoning
Old Photographs
Approximate souls lit on paper
embodied in momentary ideas
Ages of frozen time are perused
snapshots, portraits, studies
groupings, divisions
seen through moving contexts -
phantoms become physical
Someone something somehow somewhere
in light’s passage through air
where physical artifacts store
memories
accurate but false, misleadingly
true
boxed, indexed, stuck, lost, ignored,
or forgotten
Eyefuls of daggers, of clouds or of
nothing
commemorative two dimensional
renderings
keepsakes of empires sent to fade
personhood stolen and sealed away
essence and presence wed
Out the In Outbox
Cold and unbelievable, slowly crumble
sidewalks shed thawing morning ice
aggregates and disbelief causes disasters
as if a dark force erupts within
ice particles
For shards of ice fly in turbulent
air
Within the raw reality of polar
beauty
in the frozen air appears without warning
where there is in no case
non-life factors
Poetry Festival
Creative
writers in a state of brain death
neglect
to tailgate the poetry festival
Their
readings echo tinnily in a labyrinth
which
on first blush seemed navigable
but
the lack of Dionysian frenzy blinds them
all
walking identical paths suddenly are lost
Their
mishmash words drone haltingly
as
panels debate orthographic conventions
Someone
nervously mentions the Minotaur
in the drifting haze from a subterranean
river
Out
beyond the literary muddle profuse fireworks
crackle
electricity in stormy bright white pulses
Mayhem!
Chaos! The beast is loosed on the crowd
Poets
scuffle and run knocking each other down
The
festival like a San Fermin raceway surges wildly
as
the Minotaur gores, stomps and snorts angrily
From
a swaying flagpole above the battlefield dais
I
survey bloodshed, screams ringing in my ears
A
great bronze-sheathed god leeringly appears
There
is no escape from the cockpit of death now
Clubbing,
spearing and hacking life from the bards
The
steely attacker seeing red is bereft of mercy
Relentless
rage pervades the closing ceremony
leaving
plentiful food for vultures, flies and rats
Listen: It’s No Secret, Marty Balin
At age 18 I was unprepared for the sheer passion of Marty Balin
singing “It’s No Secret”. With Jefferson
Airplane backing him at full-blast in a dim, worn-out psychedelic ballroom,
this performance whacked me upside my head.
Sure, I knew that people could get worked up and express
emotion, but this was incomparably more intense and overwhelming than any previous
artistic proclamation of emotionality I had ever experienced. It was the pure expression of distilled,
undiluted LOVE that I heard in his song and voice. It fairly turned me around and shook my
whole rocking world. I remember thinking something like, “Holy Smokes, now I
GET this song!”
I believed Marty: he absolutely cut through the murk1
and communicated real feeling. Friends,
this is a rare thing when a person can summon strong emotion and then
communicate it effectively to another person. It’s even rarer when the hearer
can feel that emotion 53 years later. The lyrics are pretty simple, “It’s no secret
that I love you, yeah I love you”, but I could internalize it whole and feel it.
I can still feel it.
Beyond the fact that in the original recording of “It’s No
Secret” (from 1966’s Jefferson Airplane Takes Off) that Marty fairly
leaps off the turntable, grabbing your collar and proclaiming his love and the necessity
and primacy of love. One can hear the so-called
Summer of Love straining to jump off the vinyl, but not quite reaching an
adequate pinnacle. Still, this initial blast of unfiltered love is astonishing
to hear. My “live” hearing of Airplane’s
jumped-up 1969 live version is an after-echo of the feeling the hippies were
trying and mainly failing to get at. Love.
I could vibe it there at the Aragon Ballroom.
There are live versions of the Airplane and Marty unchaining
his heart on this song, notably on the volcanic 1969 live recording, Bless
It’s Pointed Little Head. There,
Marty and Grace Slick are off to the races, duetting madly. It’s a fairly
Olympian speed-acid rendition. Though this recording is better than good, it
pales to what I heard when as a college freshman, I hitchhiked home to see Jefferson
Airplane in Chicago. Many things stand out about this experience (such as being
absolutely transfixed by Grace Slick) but the intense emotion delivered by
Marty Balin and the wild range and dynamism of his tenor took the melting icing
off the cake.
Marty Balin is something of a dis-remembered hero of the rock
sixties. His songs perfectly captured the ideal of love writ large. On the
Airplane’s breakthrough album, Surrealistic Pillow, his two ballads, “Comin’
Back to Me” and “Today” were its most powerful expressions, even in a setting featuring
the hippie warhorses “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” (featuring Grace,
not Marty). Marty’s was the voice of real
and complete romanticism.
One can add in the Summer of Love echoes Marty later recorded,
like his solo record, “Hearts” and the gigantic Jefferson Starship hit, “Miracles”
as evidence of his continued emotional effectiveness.
Jefferson Airplane was originally Marty’s band and helped establish
the sixties folk-rock, psychedelic and counterculture scene as they recorded
hit albums and played the Monterrey, Woodstock and Altamont festivals where
Grace, not Marty consistently got the spotlight.
It’s somewhat difficult to remember what things were like way
back when “It’s No Secret” was recorded, but the romantic sound of Marty Balin’s
voice points the way. Marty Balin was talented, extreme and authentic. He
captured, sang and probably inspired the dream of the Summer of Love.
1. There was
a lot of murk in 1969 psychedelic ballrooms
man standing on his head at the end of the world
insects buzz hover dart vanish
past arboreal ashfalls’ burnt taste
spire weed breezes tingle lips, nose
grasses and evergreen scrubs below
shudder with birds wings flapping
inner and outer dimensions interswirl
air past ears skin of arm hair tickles
looped steepled globed circle-horizons
tiring, head-top set in tufts of grass
roseate view of sun through eyelids
the abracadabra of this world, those
litanies of sorrows and joys mingle
mangle memories like wash water-wrung
laundry of long ago water rushes afar
sleeping head clears breath outside-in
dreams mixing with emptied worlds freeing
streams running distant water falling
throwing everything at non problems
Silver and golden
windowsill cat
past whose backlit
window-screen
seems to blaze as
motes float along
filtering sunlight
in laser streams
down to the floor
as the cat purrs
Middle School Dance
Her recent charm discovers upward
the entertainment of eager eyes
as dancing she and he interlock, boy
who stands upright, full of fervor
senses a scented paradise in her sarong
languidly wrapped as her limbs ease, flex
and receive as both caress the shared vision
of a rapid jungle daydream rapture:
Youth is rowing into a slippery cove
where passion’s sweet tang slaps time
in tidal rhythm as each surge washes
across the festival gymnasium dancefloor
Mountain Dog
A dull boy on a walkabout sees stranger fauna
than back down home - menacing dark souls
and big wild dogs that lurk in biblical fog
and powerful ladies menacing and solid
The lax boy meets the bright girl in the fog
as a mountain dog on a crag barks resolutely
When the boy kisses the bright lass in the mist
she decks him with her quick hard right fist
The punching teen leaves him alone to perish
but steadily he wakes as the dog licks his face
whimpers and paws in the moonless darkness
He shambles down the path at the dog’s lead
He thinks Tennessee is just a microdot away
drawls slowly in down-mountain canine mentality
The holy boy, his mind doubled by events
like a horse is wary of his legs on slippery tile
Long exertion deposits him upon a boulder
with dog at his feet waiting for his recovery
till slowly sun dawns on broken jaw pain
and his spirit guide leads him to deliverance
passenger
sometimes I’m a lead
soldier
standing in a dim locomotive
cab
I see no engineer, a phantom
controls roaring nerve trains
the quickness with which I
move
is befogged in the harsh
din
derailed nomad in a spirit
world
Idling Across Great Expanses
as I eat my chili mac
super bus, my shiny metal
friend
goes faster than cheetahs
slower than a mistake
crisscrosses country
back and forth
like La Nina
as forces of nature fade
on the Overland Express
my friends are all here
dealing penny ante
poker, spades, hearts,
canasta
as we discuss our youth
not listening as the bus
calmly rattles
over prairies, bridges, mountain cuts
swerving roads on our
curving words
ambiguous
chowder for sharks
past graveyards, churches,
steeples
I pull the cord
to de-bus
but there is nowhere to
stop the travel
as my nerves unravel
tires spit gravel
O Super Bus
rumble through
orchards
one
last turnaround
to make a daydream spin
between asleep and awake
a note strikes a fan blade
and warbles
bends upward then downward
rapidly
shears like a drum beat seeks
dimension
distending outward
as if a bird in a tree
singing sharply at dawn
ascends circular, elliptical
to scribe her arc
quavering awake mid-air
