On hearing the sad news that Jack Micheline died Friday morning, February 27, 1998, alone on a BART train running from San Francisco to Orinda....
Bob Holman
Jack Micheline, painter, poet, the guy next to you at the bar, boho, true spirit, grizzled guzzler of all the U.S. could offer, pappy, sappy, smart sass and free-flow po. RIP, Brother Man. No one can keep you out of Heaven.
Jack rides last train to Orinda
Sweet sleep (free fare!), ne’er surrender
The artful codger, origibeat
Pure poet, soulful, now complete
~Bob Holman
Here’s an unpublished (as far as our eye can see) poem of Jack’s, handed over at—God, what’s the name of that bar in Soho, the Last Bar in Soho? Fanelli’s, that’s it—I’d run into Jack there occasionally. Jack loved the performance, the pizzazz. He loved Bob Kaufman, and I was working on a Kaufman reading then, and he said, “I’ve got this poem,” and he spontaneously bopped it... I wrote it down, quickly, like a painting, or a drawing of a poem. A typical Micheline move, beatitudinous spring day, poems everywhere, couldn’t help but trip over one.
Thank You, Bob KaufmanThank you, Jack Micheline!
That day in the Marina we threw your ashes in the Bay
You made the rainbows come
Not even the Pope could do that
From Coit Tower to Angel Island to Sausalito
You sent us a signal
A love call in the sky
Thank you, Bob Kaufman
~Jack Micheline
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Margery Snyder
More often than not, if you wandered into a bar in North Beach or the Mission District in San Francisco in the late 1980s, early 1990s, you’d run into Jack Micheline, and he’d trade a broadsheet poem or sing his “It’s the Dead” song for a drink. Sometimes when I saw him in the last years of his life he seemed just an old, boozy blowhard, all disappointed ego and nothing to say... but when he was taken with the poetry, chanting, singing, tapping, knee slapping, Jack was an angel of the word. I’m glad I got to bask in his glow a few times back when so many poets were crowding every week into the tiny back room at the Cafe Babar, warming each other with our words.
* * * * * * *
Father Murphy
a painting by Jack Micheline
Father Murphy’s lit up
Like a lost lighthouse
A hotel for good ghosts
~Whitman McGowan
* * * * * * *
Drinking in the Park
July 1974
Crazy Jack and I got drunk in the park today
He’s always angry and I’m always sad
He does the talking and I the listening
We cry inside and keep on drinking.
I sell truth, he said. Who’ll trade me
Some truth for a sandwich?
Jack is always hungry—
For food, for women, for booze.
We are torn men, inside and out
Screaming to be seen, to be loved
We sell our philosophies in the street
Where we learned them, and we drink.
Jack and I are not alike at all
But we are brothers in our flesh
There are eagles inside our eyes
We flap and we fly and we drink.
~Ed Buryn
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Kathy Goss
For Jack
3/2/1998
A rough and necessary noise
Your foghorn voice
shouting of birdsong and butterflies
Telling off the dogshit blocks
in a muttered rosary
of poems and imprecations
Wringing your hands
in Tourettish mudras
Eggstained anchorite
commended by whisperings of angels
to narrow cells in derelict hotels
and reluctant suburban sofas
Making something beautiful
where there was nothing before
Crawling bareassed
across the sunroom floor
painting the sweaty wind of horses
While the Chinese landlady
Curtainpeeks in horror
Dispatching flotillas of envelopes
to lonelyhearts newspapers
Begging women of substance
to send big ass shots
to a Tenderloin mail drop
Pissing free wine
on the Carmel gallery sidewalk
Despising the shipwrecks
and storms at sea
that pushed your mystic portraits
off the walls
You paraded your broken heart
across a Greyhound maze of country
Spirit sagging but defiant
We celebrate life at your behest
as the sharks circle
and swallow the bait of death
Dollar signs on crustless sandwiches
A river of red wine
washed up on collectors’ walls
What a ragged emptiness
echoes through the gut
of the lost cities
A last lodestar gutters and fades
No longer possible
to triangulate our outrage
on a roiling sea of malls
and airport corridors
You never will consent
to join the ranks
of the Dead.
~Kathy Goss
