TWITCHY FINGERS & ITCHY EYES • Poetry by David Bolton

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Life as a Mustard Seed
In the early days of 2000, the world, as I knew it, came apart. In January, I lost my mother and father in the space of four days. The following month, Kathy, my wife, died after a six-month illness.

Fortunately, I was not without blessings, two beautiful daughters, Leslie and Stephanie, a big brother to lean on, and friends, lots of friends. I also had my writing. Writing, whether fiction or poetry, has always been a way to define my life, to give it order. There are few finer feelings than spending a few hours engrossed in the craft. You could say that it’s my way of meditating.

Though I’ve managed to make a living as a writer for two decades, I have had few literary successes. Amidst yellowing New Deep City Presses and Plazas, underground magazines I helped found in San Francisco and Tokyo, a pile of moldering manuscripts testifies to my lack of recognition. Yet I wouldn’t trade the creative experience for anything. Pursuing the fickle muse has made for an interesting life and helped make me the person I am today. For the most part, I like whom I see in the mirror.

The time has come to subject the world to my work. Hopefully the wisdom that I offer can act as a mustard seed, spreading a little insight for these troubled times. For the past 30-some years I have been a chronicler of experience. I offer these poems on a humble platter, making no claim to great literature, just the world as I viewed it from any number of perspectives.

Monday evenings found me in the main library at the San Francisco Writers Workshop, headed by Dean Lipton, a world-weary journalist who had arrived in Oakland via a boxcar in 1938. He had a hound-dog face that sagged on the right side, the result of a botched operation on a nerve. In a plume of smoke from his ever-present Pall Mall, Dean would dispense advice. “Dave,” he’d say, “writing is all about chemistry. The author is the alchemist.”

I would return from those sessions inspired, rich images percolating in my mind. Tuesday evenings lured me to Minnie’s Can Do, a bar on Fillmore Street, where I would try out my latest work. If you read a poem at the open mike, you got a free beer. Best deal I ever had on my poetry.

The Barker, inspired by a frenetic individual cajoling passersby as he stood beneath blinking red nipples, first appeared in the New Deep City Press, a 4-color publication run off on a mimeograph machine by its publisher, Ralph Hoffschildt, cab dispatcher extraordinaire. Mark Joseph, later a very successful novelist, and I were the editors. The New Deep City Press was an outlet for literary misfits and illustrators who happened to make a living driving a cab. We sold it out of City Lights Bookstore for a buck.

The Barker
Twitchy fingers and itchy eyes
Selling overdone thighs
Spy upon lonely brown suits,
Surrounded by nervous blue smoke.
A forced smile his disguise
Blinking lights the domain
In his solitary refrain
Of naked lady wrestlers.
"Pounds of flesh!
Mounds and mounds!"
Spouts from the clown,
White tie and red shirt
Stuffed around potato waist
He finishes his sentences
With his hands.
At two o'clock,
Silicon breasts
Leave with horny white turtlenecks,
Craggy cheeks wander on home
And the barker is left standing there,
All alone.

The Wind Blows Not for Me was inspired by Jack London’s novel, Call of the Wild. There’s a chapter that describes a winter famine that spreads across the Alaskan wilderness. London spends pages methodically describing a stag’s struggle to survive as he is pursued by Buck, a dog that has reverted to the wild. Moved by his words, I tried to capture the nobility of that stag in my own way.

The Wind Blows Not for Me
the wind blows not for me
I will not smell another moon
my bones are brittle as twigs
my thunder has been dulled, so
many suns have passed over this head.

once I towered above all
strongest of the strong
loving as no creature had loved
no male dare intrude
                  my perfume domain
but I lived too long
                          too long

my foals grew to challenge
my kingdom, my mates died
so when I knew it was time
I sailed adrift from herd
                              launched with no farewells
no buck needed to prod me

I wander with mangled antlers
alone over this frozen tundra
my back sags
my coat is worn
my hoofs no longer prance
           but sink into the march

packs of wolves eye my carcass
each taking turns nipping at my breast
not letting me eat or rest
I have no desire to resist
their attack on my flanks
no wish to crush more bones!
let them come . . . and consume,
so I may return to earth.

Isn’t it ironic that so much evil is done in the name of good?

Cruel Zeus
Would the scales fall
From the windows of our soul
If we surrendered absolutes?
The Aztec sun feeds off the young
Would we wither
Betraying the high priest's call?
Given the Fuhrer's belief
In the divinity of his blitzkrieg
Has not time arrived
For deities to exit stage left?
Their need for invocation,
Pleas on knees for victory,
Makes them most unruly guests.
Let us stray from compasses
From centers deadly pure
Call this missive naive
But sifting through Hotspur’s rubble
Reveals a radical strain
Hybrids and mutations
Desert seers and healers
Fools titillating kings
Poets and prophets and painters
Woodcarvers, witches and pantheists
Shirking the cloak of cruel Zeus
Creating mythologies and alchemy
Like rattlesnakes switching skin,
the scent of rain beckoning.

Zen master Alan Watts wrote of the art of “seeing things as though for the first time.” Indeed. I had lived in Washington briefly in the early ‘70s but hadn’t appreciated the city until I returned. As in San Francisco, I walked the streets and found inspiration wherever I looked, particularly in the street people, the ones mostly invisible to the powers-that-be.

DC Blues
Copper-sheened skin
taut to the skull
doublooned sunlight
dancing on cheeks
a cardboard box
a beggar-cup throne
the blessed chant:
“Have a nice day!”

Sax echoing off Union Station relief
Sketches of Spain softening the starkness
on this hurry-up-and-wait grey morn;
just before the Metro door
squishes the pressed and blow-dried
the tenor delivers Garibaldi Square,
on an iron grating I lean
overlooking the zocolo
at my back french windows
open for the breeze
softness a long time ago
a lover’s smile in shadows
india ink locks fanned across pillows.

Chay chay change . . .
Mantra greeting at escalator crest
metal tongue spewing suits power dresses
delicate fingers curl around a smoky swirl
back slightly bent, the proper posture for solicitation
to transfers flapping, serious heels clicking
just passing thru thank yu

Once met a scat cat
Lawrence in tweed
late at the Raven in Mount Pleasant
the Duke, Miles & the Bird blowing the juke
we clicked glasses
Lawrence discussed elegantly
a single finger poised to
demonstrate the essence of the beat
a regular Monk melody
dissonance on harmony.

Monday saw him no longer in tweed
amid Foggy Bottom hucksters and bandana freaks
stood a toothless Lawrence
rope tethered to the waist
invisible to passing frantic residents
stethoscopes swinging
scrunched up student faces
his blackened frays cultivated;
below stubble and caved-in cheeks
a sign, a plea for dignity
“Homeless be too!”
Lawrence, that you?
just a temp gig, ya dig.

Tuesday’s the best
come the Andeans
hawk noses, Inca cheeks
the blood of kings!
mandolins and pipes
feed the spirit of
those in footstep;
a persistent drumbeat
softens the concrete
if but a precious instant
linking outcast tendrils.

Shall the meek inherit the earth?
how ‘bout sideshow Jack
wheelchair boom box cowboy hat vet
a booby trap, a misplaced step
propelled Jack to this place;
he earns his daily bread
plastic big gulp vessel
above the wheel of destiny
palsied digit switching stations
in search of blues that soothe.