NORWOOD LANDLORD

Like Telluride brokers managing properties for investors, rentals in the San Miguel’s box canyon have skyrocketed, putting an Aspenated high-end gun to the head of local shops. I mourn many main street losses, but particularly Delilah – a dispensary muscled out by the corporate green dragonate and hockeystick rents. 

Not wholly unlike what happened to Telluride’s award-winning local paper, the Watch, -- undercut by a Boulder conglomeratization that bought Clark Kent’s doppelganger, which in their hands, has devolved into an Investor News Organ of legals, centerfold real estate porn, desperate want ads for housing and unfilled job ads

My Norwood neighbor, hobbling on crutches from surgery and a fall, found herself unable to afford the steep Wrights Mesa rent increase (“to keep current with the Norwood market” she was told, but of course not for any improvement to the rural farmhouse itself) and had to move out by the first of the year. I helped. Hence this week’s poem.

MOVING OUT

A coming on of night after a turn 

as Mormon Lee ferrying

my ten-year neighbor’s hoard

cruelly pushed out

her rental pupa in the chrysalis of winter

to new digs

Burrow. Concrete boots

Not really. Nicer place

kind of

The P-J an underground surround of 

forest bathing

free from noisy Norwood’s dawn truckers

Ex-urban hot mics. Clinkers 

raked from Telluride’s dangerous 

rim

from the Sixties series

 

Hot Lips by Ed Werner

Boardwalk

Cruising Santa Cruz

with McRedeye & Big Daddy Civ

Nowhere left us to migrate

here at the feet of the final roller coaster

of Manifest Destiny

Nickels & dimes hog-tied by machines

& carnie barkers roping us in

Big Daddy squeezes the trigger

on a row of die-cut ducks

Win a doll. Try your luck 

Trained gunner

a veteran of foreign wars

he knocks ‘em all down

Fills his bag with trinkets & taffy

Every booth a bird cage

Every boom a bust

Spin the wheel. Lock & load

Damn the tomorrows 

& full greed ahead

ART GOODTIMES

Lone Cone Broadside                                      Union of Mountain Poets

Vincent St. John Local / Headwaters of Maverick Draw / Aztlán

the late Jack Mueller Brigade / Western Slope / 4 Corners

 Cloud House Brigade (Retired) / San Francisco

13023

Considering GRIEF

Battleship Slide Runs on Red Mountain (photo by Jerry Roberts)

Avalanche

-for Rosemerry

Itki hits us hard in the face

Not just a slap

but a near-lethal blow

The full cold immense crush of grief

This entity we’ve never met

changing our names

to trauma

Halfback to my quarterback 

in the suburb’s flag football league

Greg

was my buddy

not just my brother

Jokester 

who’d make us giggle

hiding under the covers in his bed

telling funny stories

while parents moseyed around downstairs 

watching Fifties game shows

Dead at fifteen

In & out of El Camino Hospital

Nine months in the passing

Told us one morning with a laugh

that he’d seen himself in a dream taking

“a long walk off a short pier”

The whole family in denial

Trusting in Bishop Sheen’s 

rosary hour on the radio

& the anodyne fabulations

of our Roman hand-me-down 

faith

And yet his passing young

made me question

everything

Only to find most answers suffocating

as concrete

Eventually 

I swam my way out

free of the powder chutes

Avoiding chunky monkey rockfall

triumphant presidential krummholz

& all those beholden 

to the Imperium’s hard rock markets 

Digging out from under

the affluent overflow of a “free” world

addicted to capital

Time to open your eyes

Capt. Barefoot insists

Unpack compassion

Breathe in

the lyric valuables

cupped in your icy hands

Fill up on air ultimately

to float like a cloud 

above Lone Cone’s beauty ways

Stand in the sunlight beside

love’s melting slabs of tragedy

Art Goodtimes

Union of Mountain Poets

Jack Mueller Brigade

13023

NOTA BENE: 

“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of the world. As a pre-school teacher I learned that we learn by going through the known to the unknown. So instead of substituting “ki”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate, “itki.”  The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” That syllable, “ki”, is itkiself a Bodéwadmimwen suffix meaning “from the living earth.” 

ALTAR BOYS

Richard Ganci, Kerry Yates, Gus Guinan

 

ALTAR BOYS

                                            -for Gance

Once there may have been Reason

to genuflect to Aquinas

To join all the hims in the catacombs

beneath the Vatican's

Holy Roman Mother Church

But Paul of Tarsis & Augustine of Hippo 

had right wrong

So we threw our Greek books

out the seminary windows

Dropped out of the XIIIth century

& jumped aboard the Sixties'

acid test speedboat

Paralyzed 

by the crisp bite of Psilocybe's apple

& itki's entheogenic blanching of belief

we were enamored with the Now

Spending Sundays hunting & gathering 

shrooms on Mt. Tam. At Land's End

Kneeling before the altar of Funga

alert to itkis sudden apparitions

Learning to snap, pick, pack & play

The Pacific winds in the Douglas fir

our Introit.  The Grateful Dead our Kyrie. 

"...Deo Omnipotente..."

Having donned

a surplice of sentient mycelia

what once we served

no longer serves us

Ordained now as we are

acolytes of poetry & mushrooms

From the TRUMP RENGA

 

HOKKU

For GOP TOP GUN McCARTHY

                                -for Peng

Yes, he's been all  in-

for-Me & his infamy'll

be remembered

Laurie James

A barefoot Laurie James reading at Lithic Bookstore in Fruita 
(photo by Art Goodtimes)

Back in mid-November family and friends held a Life Celebration for a poet friend and Sparrows poetry festival organizer Laurie Violet James in Salida -- a woman who has touched many artists in Colorado, particularly on the Western Slope. 

A number of poets were involved including Barbara Ford, Rachel Kellum, Wendy Videlock, Pete Anderson, Lawton Eddy, Lynda LaRocca , Craig Nielson, aaron abeyta, SETH, Eduardo Brummel, Danny Rosen, Uche Ogbuji, Daiva Chesonis, Deborah Kelly,  Jc Cummins, Kiersten Bridger and many others from around the region. 

Laurie, Pete, Lawton, Lynda and Craig made up the River City Nomads, a performance troupe that started in 2004 and played all over Colorado.

Danny's Lithic Press in Fruita even put out a little James chapbook in honor of the memorial: First Thought, Last Thought (2022/13022). This was the chapbook we all wanted Laurie to publish in her lifetime. One of her few published poems "Conversation" appears in the Sage Green Journal, an on-line anthology of Western poets HERE 

The Life Celebration in mid-November was held in the Salida United Methodist Church led by Laurie's family, and Wendy led A Crescendo of Poetry later that evening with readings and music.

The next morning a Gourd Circle was held at the Salida Community Center that I was honored to facilitate. 

Salida poet & poetry host of radio and readings Barbara Ford wrote a most amazing, moving elegy for Laurie that she read at the Gourd Circle:

An Old Soul Enters the Spirit World

In the back forty of her closet
hung a prophet's velvet coat,
seldom worn but we knew it was there,
beyond the scarves she wrapped
twice around her throat,
crowned by a mist of long silver hair.

A blizzard, she recalled,
came to her christening,
where seven wizards conferred
about her upbringing,
Montana was often heard whispering
in her train case of mysteries.
Black widows convened
in her medicine bag garage,
mountain raspberries sweetened
her memory's tongue,
a lighter clicked,
an inch of ash flicked.
her kookaburra laugh
pinballed deep in her lungs.

Her left ankle was tattoed
with the clank of shackles
hooked to past lives towing
the usual regrets,
she was regularly seen with 
her entourage of grackles,
wreathed in the smoke
of nine thousand cigarettes.
I saw them levitate in feathered
respect when they gazed
in her blue-eyed prescient stare,
they understood her consecrated
fear of the shamanic grizzly bear.

Befriended by every goose
and squirrel, she swirled
in a collage of corvine chuckle,
fox slink, mouse wink
and the confederacy of birds
in her Jamesian world.

Her heart she kept close,
forged from miner's gold,
steel-cased in a pearlescent
shell, camouflaged most days
by a fortress of twigs,
bound tightly by hand 
to fortify the maze
that concealed the depth
of her wisdom well.

Folded in the niches
of her soul's sacred wishes
were the lines she wrote
for few to see, on pages scribed
in hieroglyphic black ink.
She claimed she lost them,
or misplaced them,
or dropped them
under the laundry sink.

Our Rachel found them,
dried and ironed them,
gave us solace in a river
of poems from which we drink
and drink and drink.

Countless poets have tried
to set their nets to catch the words
that flew wild when she died,
in ceremonies of trance and chant,
in rituals of dervish dance,
on thresholds of holy happenstance.

In supplication to the universe,
I offer this attempt to honor her
in verse, to exalt in glory
of one who lived and rhymed
with Story, possessed of her share
of alternative names, But I
just called her Laurie James.

A Sixties San Francisco Love Poem

 

Inspired by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poem-a-day practice, I've made a New Year's resolution, as we Americans are wont to do. For 50+ years I've been writing poems, hundreds and hundreds of them, and tossing them into piles.  My archives are voluminous. Having written a history column in Telluride for 10+ years (Mining the Gold), I know how important saved papers can be. Losing years worth of  journals (and most everything else) in a Placerville fire  in the early '80's didn't help. 

So, in the years-long process of moving out of Cloud Acre in Norwood, I've stumbled on a bin of old poems going back to  the mid-Sixties when I returned from my VISTA year on the Crow Reservation in Lodgegrass, Montana, to Herb Caen's Baghdad-by-the-Bay -- just in time for the Summer of Love. 

I plan on reviewing at least one a day.  Revising. Reshaping. Recreating as I love to do. Poetry is my meditation. My free play time. I'm starting from the top of loose-leaf congeries two feet deep with only occasional dates. Here's the first one I've found where I didn't want to change much of anything. 

MONA

riding a motorcycle

isn't the only way to 

see San Francisco

unless you're circling the block

to pick up a young lady

who says yes

& smiles like a farm in

Santa Cruz where the apples

aren't waxed

delight twists the throttle

hugging our way

through traffic

when we stop she climbs

the stairs to do her dishes

the sky a soapy gray

gliding back down Market St.

her telephone number

whistles  in my wallet

like kids running to school

in the rain

without their umbrellas