San Francisco

Dear World,

I moved to San Francisco...again. I'm playing the lost Beat...again.
Give me a job when I need one; give me a place to stay each night. Fill my belly with one meal a day and pot of coffee and I'll give the gold forged faintly in the smithy of my soul.

I understand the meaning of working for what you get and so long as I'm not working, I believe I deserve nothing. Every lazy day is met with an empty stomach and lice-ridden couch to crash upon. I once woke up on a floor in New York City with cockroaches dancing on my sweaty naked belly. Some time soon after, due to a certain kind of work it's improper to discuss here, I woke up on the same floor with a naked girl next to me and (most likely) the same dancing cockroaches on my same naked belly.

It's all in the nature of cause and effect; Marx's dictum each according to what he is capable (or something like that). You get what you put in and if what you want is not a reward but more a state of being, then be that state in what you forge with your foolish fumbling hands.

My armpits reek and over my head flies a Pirate flag. James' typewritten memoires curl enticingly to my slight left. I read, "the telling of psychic tales the planting of one's first garden, the caring innate you watered above ground at the mercy of wind and rain, below safe in the warm round earth the liberty of loneliness, the mindless buzz of the midnight cigarette the streetlamps spearing the fog in the darkness of the park paths giddy girls pulled back onto the sidewalk by boys before cars rush by"

Christ I'm sneezing a lot because there's a cat afoot in this 5 bedroom house; and foods that once could be ate without complaint are now upchucking into a mucusy throat, indigestion, and an angry belly. Changes are afoot like cats in 5 bedroom houses. New allergies, Eustace Conway lighting a solitary lamp showing the way to Occupy our own futures, and the simple quiet conviction that in every moment we prove how much we want to live by how much we choose to live.

In the spirit of my arrival, I wrote two poems I would like to share with you, unedited:

1
The grey seagull:
half owl, half hawk
swoops over my head.
In the lake, the usual grey-winged, white-backed
crowd parades.
The messenger flies.


2
When you need to know,
see he who presides 
beyond the tedious panic,
smiling softly
with nothing in his hands.
Take a stab at him, and
perhaps you will know


Also an idea for poetry writing:
Alternative word poems: writing poems with footnotes to indicate possible alternative words at specific points. This can elaborate an idea horizontally, in synchronicity as the poem proceeds.