Poetry
Felix Thursday
Autobiography
When I was 19
and not Rimbaud,
but enraptured with cemeteries
and the springtime possibilities
up girl's skirts.
Sex wherever,
like eating over the sink.
Driving home from the ocean
with sand in my pubic hair.
Sitting beret-headed
and taciturn in corners
of the ill-lit cafes on
Mendocino Avenue.
Smoking pot on top
of parking garages.
Voting Jerry Brown for president.
Rent that even I could afford.
Sleeping on hardwood floors
of strange Berkeley cottages.
Or up all night with punks
or White Witches.
And Old Turk LeClair,
last of the Surrealists,
banned from the galleries
for who knows why.
Coming over often,
possessing the odor
of sweat and oil paints,
to ask if I was holding
or to use the telephone.
Or else espousing Dada
from the seat of his bicycle.
Or telling me about Ginsberg's hand
on his knee at a bar one time.
Or coaxing our nudity,
discussing the discovery of youth.
And all the other special no one ghosts.
We had minds that were as simple
and dangerous as guns.
**
31 now, and not Gregory Corso,
but hating old poet men even more
as I get older.
Afraid to sleep because
of old lovers who stage sit-ins
in the hallways of my dreams.
Waking up between two bodies.
Fat, sadhappy, oversexed and paranoid.
The Unwelcome Wagon will come 'round
to my door eventually.
When I am old and crooked
and Hemingway-like,
but out of ammunition.
It's 50 years since the Last Chance America.
Crazy with the pressure of visions and revisions,
and the anxieties of manhood and zeitgeist.
But there are more futures
where the last one came from.
