It was quite a bleak today here in San Francisco.
So bleak, that it reminded me of a even more dreary day here in June, which inspired this poem.
This city has some of the most beautiful weather of anywhere in the world sometimes,
but also has some of the worst weather also, which provides for a good contrast and is good inspiration.
Anyway, here's the poem
Green and grey
Auras of mystic sadness
Tone deaf
Yet a slow pounding noise rustles him awake
Shadows of puppets in the morning mirror
Slow yet urgent
Twinkling piano keys
Mixed in with a baby's cry
Green and grey
The children walk to school surrounded by the thick fog
rick [email] said at 9:20 AM 10-19-2004: Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
O lovely mammal
her nearly naked breasts
throw taut shadows
as she stretches up
to hang at last the last of her
so white washed sins
but it is wetly amorous
and winds itself about her
clinging to her skin
So caught with arms upraised
she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the reachless seascape spaces
between the blown white shrouds
stand out the bright steamers
to kingdom come
nelson. said at 1:54 AM 10-20-2004: Odd that you mentioned Ferlinghetti.
I see him about once a week eating at this famous cafe in the Haight-Ashbury district.
He always has a huge smile on his face, and with his long white hair and enormous belly, he resembles Santa Claus eating scrambled eggs and home fries while reading the newspaper.
I actually went to his bookstore,
City Lights, today.
I think no trip to SF is complete without a visit to City Lights followed by a drink at Vesuvio's across the street(where Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan, and so many others drank back in the day).
Today was another grey, bleak, yet beautifully morose day spent working in the North Beach neighborhood.