REMEMBERING BOB KAUFMAN

He was first class in a class-

Less world, walking the streets

Of north Beach

An ancient warrior with hollow eyes

That seared the dazzling lights of the

City by the bay

His eyes boring into you 

Like a drill

Carrying decades of heavy sorrow

On his back 

like a bent-over hunchback

Overcome with the rust of time

Flesh stripped to the marrow

The mirror of his eyes doing a slow dance

Up and down Grant Avenue

A dark shadow riding clouds of

“Ancient Rain”

His life measured in hot jazz and verse

A surreal mirage where hip cats

Wailed in precision rhythm

As he walked an imaginary zoo

Looking for tigers to talk too

Runaway poems blaring in his ears

Like a stuck car horn

The Ancient Rain falling

            falling

                        falling

Washing away his wounds

POEM FOR JACK MICHELINE

There’s class and then there’s high class

No academic education

The streets his classroom

A high note of a wailing saxophone

The spark that ignites a fire

He was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s

A glass of imported beer

A shaman

A vagabond poet shuffling words

Like a river-boat gambler

Ravished by illness

Ravished by time

He painted his visions on canvass

In parks in bars and coffee houses

His poems singing out across the

Streets of America

Pure innocence

Pure genius

Spinning words that hung in the air

Like a hummingbird drunk on the

Pollen of life

DIGITAL AGE

I told you not to take a snapshot

I don’t photograph well

But you did nevertheless

A real class act, sending it to me

As an attachment

And there it was on the screen

In black and white the only colors that matter

And it split into two parts on the screen

Neither of them doing me justice

An injustice I am sure not intended

This faceless face staring back at me

Smashed into a thousand lines

This snapshot more like an empty face

Stuffed away in a shoebox

In the far corner of a closet

Like a series of quick winks lost

In cyber space

A.D. Winans

Last update : 17-04-2007 20:34

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