• CHARLES

    Bukowski, you old satyr when you croaked was there the great American novel locked away in your head. When you pickled yourself was it for fear that the words locked away inside would spew forth like your lunch so many nights as you verged on alcohol poisoning. When you read Burroughs could you picture the…


  • WALKING

    Like the Anasazi’s sudden departure from his cliff dwelling I too snuck away, with hardly any trace from a life no longer in clear recollection, only faint images survive, of hours in the City Lights Bookstore reading Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, then buying the slim volume “Gasoline” not because it was my greatest desire, but…


  • WALKING

    Like the Anasazi’s sudden departure from his cliff dwelling I too snuck away, with hardly any trace from a life no longer in clear recollection, only faint images survive, of hours in the City Lights Bookstore reading Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, then buying the slim volume “Gasoline” not because it was my greatest desire, but…


  • CITY LIGHTS

    It was a Tuesday in October or a Wednesday in March, hard to say which, but evening. We had taken a cab from the Hyatt Embarcadero or the Fairmont, it didn’t much matter, and sat in the Chinese restaurant on the edge of Chinatown, or a pasta and seafood joint in North Beach, and you…


  • CORSO

    When my back was turned, Corso slipped away somewhere in Wisconsin silently, without protest carried off by Charon across a gasoline river. There was no bomb to announce his departure, no Queens orphanage stopped frozen in a silent moment. In the small park at the north end of Salt Lake City no one lifted a…


  • IN MEMORIUM: NAMELESS ONE

    My muse drowned in a torrent of words. I buried her on page 243 of War and Peace. Kafka read the eulogy, while Ferlinghetti dozed in the third pew. I sat Shiva for a week and the guests brought endless casseroles of Westlake, Cornwell and Kellerman. I waited for Ondaatje to sooth my grief, but…