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...and uncountable hours listening to my
problems, poems, love affairs, peering
thru the squalls of my life as if staring at
a carefully constructed model galleon
that might sink, erupt in flame,
fire cannons, or maybe just sail blithely
into the future flying your flag, a big red
anarchist “P” for the poet you conjured...
By now you’re the longest friend I ever dreamed—
since Danielle disappeared into drugs
and you watched and David did himself dead
and you watched and your mother whose silence
was pointed as a question died and I watched
and my father’s cancer and the Berkeley Inn fire and
the year you first got a tv and my son was born and
Maura and Eli and Chris and Polly and Rudy and Kathleen
and Peter’s Pub and Babar and BarBar and Paradise
and the desire to burn into the bosom of eternity
that moves us like puppets, no, like clowns,
keystone clowns chasing beauty, love, god,
whatchayama, the whole transcendental
cosmocomical Punch & Judy lifeline,
peering up the skirt of time with our
pure polished palms of misperception attempting
to take in the broad horizon of eternity
and the description comes up as
a street singer’s missing teeth,
a young cub’s nose ring, a man’s need to tell
how it felt sitting in a cell, Pops romancing a mannikin,
while I bounced from Berkeley to Leningrad to Las Vegas, from
Mercedes to poet punk to single dad, it’s better luck to
spend your time counting beans in a bongo
than to go hunting snipes in a notebook.
But luck’s a cheap lover, she’s deserted me
years at a time, never half as patient with me
as you, my friend, who could
watch me watch the spring students as the sight of
the girls filled me like a quarter cup of coffee
and you’d get the better poem off watching me watch.
And here’s one you didn’t know, me my sanguine self & I
watching you, with you, trundling up to the Avenue,
day in, with your broad stitched bag full of books
and ten eyeball rings, black smock and yellow button
Weird & Proud and your simple sketches of real
people in their grandiose stupidities and
effortless generosities, and easy paced lives
that I envy so from my lost perch with you,
the hours sitting at a cafe table watching,
sketching, conjuring some better line to reach
people, divine in idiocrasy, weird,
and proud, and
pleased round as a pumpkin with
this poem, dear friend,
is for you.
© 2003, Bruce Isaacson
Bruce Isaacson is known in NY as finalist in the inaugural NY Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, in LA as part of the Helena's-Largo series reading with the likes of Alec Baldwin, Harry Dean Stanton and Moon Zappa, and in SF as part of the Babarian Spoken Word revival. He gave us the following bio:
“Bruce Isaacson went to schools and earned degrees. He also wrote books and published poems. He spent way too much time around the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Once, Gregory Corso was giving one of his last public readings at a college. During the reading, when Bruce came in, Gregory pointed at him and shrieked ‘You! You fucker!’”
Back to the article > “Poetry You Can Actually Read,” an interview with Bruce Isaacson, publisher of Zeitgeist Press
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