Doug Knott – In Memoriam: California Poets Part 6, Thirty Poems
Doug Knott (1943-2022)
October 18th, 2023
California Poets: Part VI
Doug Knott
Thirty Poems
Poems generously provided by Janet Sager Knott
Collection of Poetry by Doug Knott
Editor: Marsha de la O
2021-2022
Table of Contents
Grampie Wore Gray (originally “Grandfather in St. Augustine is Gone”)
Astral Projection
Goodbye Anxiety, Hello Franz Kafka
Eat my Words
Home-Schooling Myself – Pandemic High 2020
Devil May Care
Law of the Jungle
Vanishing Point
Tantric Orchard
My Mother the E-Train
Like a Hollywood Lawyer
Pharoah Takes a Trip
I Learn the Con on 42nd Street
Lesson in Conversational Portuguese
Home Movie in Green and White
Queen of Thin Air
Smart-Ball
Kansas City Boilo-Boilo
Flaneur New York
The Aware Wolves
’s Photography Joke
The Thomas Fire
Apology to Greta Thunberg
Sunset Strip Self-Improvement Affirmations
Forgotten Museum
Silver
Vineyards of Fresno
I Become Surreal at an Art Opening
Reverse-World
Walk like an Early Man
1.
GRAMPIE WORE GRAY
Originally “Grandfather in St. Augustine is Gone” (Doug Knott Rev 9-10-21)
He was the coolest guy
Gave me a little bicycle when I was 6
which I learned to ride on the stone path around
The grand old Spanish fort, its walls 30 feet thick,
later occupied by English invaders,
and then the militant Confederacy --
the best fort ever for a little boy!
Grampie played a card-game
Called Russian Bank with 4 decks
And two players, and when I played with him
He remembered every trick
And hid behind his fan of cards,
murmuring, “bad, bad, bad”
and then nailed me with his hidden Queen, of course --
So I appreciated his military technique
His own father a lieutenant in the Confederate Army
His father’s father, a private in the same,
My grandfather was proud of the Army of Northern Virginia
And made sophisticated jokes about President Lincoln,
pointed out the battles, like Chancellorsville
And Olustee just out of Jacksonville
where “we done beat the Yankee” and
killed 500 Union soldiers
200 of whom were black
But my grandfather was buddies with an old black guy
Named Singleton, who rode a bicycle
and fixed things around the house
They cruised around together side by side
in the wide front seat of grandfather’s old Cadillac;
But on my dad’s side, my uncle in Tallahassee
Threw me out of the house after I did the big Selma march in ’65 -
Said I stunk like the N-word
But I was glad to go
And left Dixie and the Lost Cause to go to school
Up North in Yankeeland where they called me “South’ner,”
so I dropped my cracker accent to fit in
and even said I was from New York, New York, and started
Talking like I was Jewish from Brooklyn; and then
the South got real un-popular
But I was in the Civil Rights generation
marching in the big marches because I thought it was right
And became a beatnik type of modern person
Although I am no longer modern,
But peeking over the edge of my personal world
As it extends day-to-day and flat like a map,
which means I will soon fall off the edge
Into “here be dragons & sea monsters”
And it looks like the Confederate Army has come around again
Now flying the banner of the criminal ex-president
Except without the bravery, dignity and honesty
Of my grandfather --
And I know how they think: that they got screwed
and will stand tall and fight back against invaders,
And how tough they are, and how much they love the orange-haired demon
Who spews insect lies to inspire their fierce Cause, now Lost,
They are the most righteous form of man
And they will not respond to peace
Because they are accustomed to casual hate,
Like the chewed cigar gone sour in the bowl
And I see them on the other side of me
Like Arjuna, the mythical prince of India
saw his own family rigged out and carrying swords
On the enemy side in the “Bhagvad Gita;”
But I don’t ride in Krishna’s stone chariot of mind;
I ride my mental bicycle around a lucky fort called home
And my grandfather is 50 years all bones
In the disintegrating swamp of history
With his battle-winning cards from the game of Russian Bank,
Sentimental affection for the Stars and Bars,
And a little boy’s love;
He’s all fermented in his box under the Spanish moss,
the verdant stink of the salt marshes
always near the nose in St. Augustine
sweat even in the shade
and now only a memory
a movie about to end,
that little bicycle rolling downhill
through the last bars of the ancestral song
“In Dixie land where I was born,
look away, look away”
Richmond, Virginia, 1943
Going, going,
and gone
******
2. Astral Projection (DOUG KNOTT rev 2-22-22)
I never went out-of-body
til I partied with my law school roommates
and crashed on top of my bed curled up and drunk as a bat.
In the middle of the night I woke
Suspended above that bed
and floated down the hallway
bumping lightly on the ceiling,
being a living but invisible cloud.
This was no dream. I went bump against the wall
like a rubber elephant in a swimming pool,
that is also a cage
At the top of the brown kitchen door I blew up
with fear in great yellow lightning bolts
lashing against my dirigible of air:
I did some quick throbs against the ceiling
And my blood sucked out in panic
like low tide in the Bay of Fundy
And I deeply feared I would never ever
get back into my beloved body -
So I shouted to my essence, “Stop this experience!”
And in an instant I was back over my own body
under me and still in bed, curled up like a coat I had just put down
and I snapped back into my flesh
and was again secure -
Such is the fear of permanent nowhere
When I hear (infrequently) of astral projection,
I smile to myself.
The earth is my mother and I’m not going anywhere
There’s that doorway where everybody
leaves the house and goes into the back yard after dark
the color of the that grass I’ll find out
Meanwhile, I’ll stay in bed.
********
3.
GOODBYE ANXIETY, HELLO KAFKA
(Doug Knott rev 2-20-22)
It was a trial of sand
With evidence of self-burial
A lifetime of waving many legs in the air
Trying to turn over
What kind of impression will I make on God?
Will he find me wanting, or simply odd?
I want acquittal in the conflict
of loving and rejection of love,
Because I was too young at the time.
Yes, I admit taking part in my own physical decline
living on without permission or even good taste
I’m quite a specimen to scuttle along so long
A few bedsores, but still eager.
Maybe it was all a reflection
Or my own invidious projection --
And I was the only one fooled. Damn.
The earth doesn’t turn, it leans.
Give me a verdict with a center of gravity
And I promise to ignore it.
*******
4.
Eat my Words (Doug Knott 6-1-21)
I am a speck of living gland,
with a very short attention span.
My thoughts fly off into the void
like a spaceman’s breath
My face, re-purposed
As a tiny moon
Or as a small spaceship --
Full personal expression at last!
Just from very far away
The words appear first in single file,
Then crowd the page
Start to shout
I lose track of their individual faces
They press up against me like I was the Pope in a Pope-mobile
They need me, but it’s transactional
All day long people pop up like billboards or on zoom
Thank God for them, otherwise I’d be a lonely planet.
I read their messages and advertisements,
Subtle, overt, unconscious –
Sometimes a filmy look – (particularly if on zoom)
but without coming to any conclusions,
Although I would like to deny the past
Or any confrontation.
I should embrace the sweetness of the past
Even if it never was --
It’s ketchup on ghost-burgers of memory
Small questions spill like a bag of fries:
Reality: is it “show” or “tell?”
Is theology really comedy?
Who helps who control who?
After dinner I wash familiar dishes
Like a cat cleaning its paws
I eat meat, too, but I’d never kill it,
Unless my car did it for me.
Poetry is so cruel
5.
Home-Schooling Myself (Doug Knott 3-16-21)
The self-help books said I could not grab the sky,
Because I already contained the sky.
So I went halfway down the stairs
Wanting to explore Death
Saw that very guy with his tacky black wheelbarrow
Standing at the bottom. Mutual thumbs up!
“See you in a while,” he said,
“Try to have a good time.”
Social distancing is lonely
Home is creative detention
I pound tiny fists on an anonymous keyboard
Ideas thick as a cornfield
About our national conniption and decline --
Which I believe is the true dialectic of history
Like after we’ve had it good,
We have to have it bad
And my efforts are futile except
The good lung exercise shouting to liberal friends on the phone
And my wife deplores my athletic trips to the grocery store
Where I buy meat in big plastic containers that are themselves
a symbol of why our fossil-fuel society cannot endure.
People on TV are asking, “What was this year, 2020?”
Well, only metaphors can comprehend abstractions,
Like what is inside a lump of time?
The way we make circles with our minds.
I am defying gravity by talking on the page –
What do you do for kicks?
******
6. DEVIL-MAY-CARE (Doug KnottEd-Fin V. 5-23-22)
Dark thoughts are not wrong thoughts.
They are migrant shadows.
There’s nothing to laugh at here in the ho-ho hills
because oneself is the big laugh
held back til the author
gets out of range
through time, distance, death, or no
media presence
Nervous and perverse,
pushing emotional commotion
Satan turns out to be a comedian
********
7.
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE (Doug Knott ED-Fin 5-24-22)
There is no jungle
Only the dense air between us
The old lion is my father
Who calls me in for his last words,
Which are that he wants to sue his doctor
Who was new, didn’t put the tube in right
Or take the time to even be nice
He wants to sue my cousin
Who by stealth took all the good furniture
When the old folks died in Tallahassee,
And even though my father signed a receipt
...he was deceived!
And those people down the street need to get sued, too –
For that house they have, that we should have.
Pressed for the year of this bad deal,
He admitted it was 1955
His last question was, are these good causes?
Do they “have merit?”
Which means, can we draw blood?
You see, like him, I am a lawyer
And like him, a skinny beast
And I said, on several metaphorical levels –
Because I am no longer a lawyer,
That the costs would outweigh the benefits.
We nodded wisely together,
Like trees by a river
And I left him in his lair
An emaciated old lion
Bemoaning a lack of teeth.
*****
8.
Vanishing Point - (Rev 5-24-22 Doug Knott)
(new poem from Van-Pt; decision to break it into 2 poems, this is the first one, called “Van-Pt ONE” or “Mom at Sea” THE 2ND “VAN-PT TWO”
ONE
My mother has gone to sea at last
Out beyond the channel markers
The horizon already
Bobs up and down
I see her from the shore and call,
And call, but she will never read this poem.
I have looked for her in voice mails
And greeting cards and never
Found her: our linkage
Was a vanishing point,
Something like that horizon
Appearing first as a lost island,
Then a white sail,
Then a mirage
And now as her abandoned mooring
washes up on the shore,
I see her as the girl she once told me she was,
testing something deep inside herself
out of sight of land and the eyes of men
on the raw, gray Atlantic
*******
TWO
Alone in her wooden sixteen-footer,
The bow curling up ahead, her hand
Guides the 1932 Evinrude outboard motor
Hanging over the single plank behind her.
In this deep water beyond the easternmost reef
She is captain supreme,
Her body a trigger,
Her mind flashes between water and light –
While her body totters around her apartment,
Her hands shake too much to hold a dinner plate.
She has packed her gear in that little boat
She always kept, but kept hidden from everyone,
Pulled up in the shore reeds of passing years
Until she would need it.
She is ready again to take to the sea,
Where the waves quiver like smoke
And the distant roar coming closer and closer
To her ear from beneath her pillow at night
Is the huge white beating of wings
********
9.
THE TANTRIC ORCHARD (Doug Knott Ed-Fin 5-24-22)
For Janet
I am so lucky to have found this orchard
With you in it.
Under the soil our roots embrace
Like small animals driven underground
The twisted branches of the apple trees reach
Back to touch their thighs.
Such springtime muscles
Shot off this green cannonball of earth
Lie on the wet grass with me
Like fruit we swell and rub against each other
Kiss like raindrops in the milky sunlight
Grasping roots inside you
I will transplant them in a shrine
Alive with wet green dripping things
That shake themselves awake
And I will visit you with blue lakes and reckless hills
And we will watch the big white summer birds fly by
Like abandoned opportunities searching for their season.
Around us, black grappling branches orchestrate the air
which parts, and endlessly parts again.
The whole orchard ripples in a soft green chord
Where the land ends, and the feelings begin
***
10.
My Mother the E Train
E-train crosses Manhattan, turns down West Side.
On the yellow-stripe platform,
Attention sucked by sharp bright light
People clench butt-muscles
Grip bags, turn up-track like
meerkats for the familiar stranger
with the roar that jiggles flesh
Stand up for the E train,
Stand up for the might of door!
This sandworm with
the same steel mouth at both ends
can eat through formerly secure island granite
with the speed of pornography
Up there on 5th avenue, there’s
Concrete and hypocrisy, plus
Delight in shop windows.
The real weight of all that concrete
Is both finite and infinite.
Rich people are holding up banks
People walk with umbrellas pitched against cloud and rain
Water towers stagger on roofs
We’re just a wriggle in the terrarium
Reeling around the west side.
My buttocks slam against the wall,
And I celebrate humility, efficiency, electricity,
Survival and abuse, and in this car,
Enjoy the migration of other urban creatures --
Namely the decrepit, the one-legged, the wool-capped,
The glamorous, the highly-pressed
And all those who have sex inside their suits
Up-river in the spawning grounds, or
Downtown towards the sea of birth
That girl looks thoughtful
Between earphones like teardrops --
She’s going to eat her phone!
I want to see her mouth open silver and red
And the metal stop talking
Stand up for Spring Street – what spring is that?
Expulsion into cold dull day
Tourniquet of noon.
Threading pedestrians, I
Walk fast as a winter riddle,
But it’s only for lunch with a friend -
a pasta restaurant with floppy noodles
in an all-night, all-eyes city
Which is itself a restless hunter,
And I got here invisibly --
Because nobody who saw me
saw me
*******
11.
Like a Hollywood Lawyer – ED-Fin 5-25-22
Poetry does not require cash.
Life and movies require cash.
Walter required a lawyer -
I required cash,
And threw in some poetry for interest
Walter, an old-time indie movie producer
A phone-in-each-ear guy,
Talked twisty as a Mobius stripper,
Made deals in a whisper
I, as lawyer, a casual bottom feeder,
Not tough but easy,
Enjoyed Walter, his hair slick
Just back from Cannes
Walter, an anaconda,
was too fat to get in my Mini-Cooper
But took movies to Cannes,
the big topless international film festival,
And sold them on a burnished yacht deck
Under big bright breasts of sun.
Distribution followed. Burp.
II.
We sat in the rented Laurel Canyon pool-house office
at the end of the sculpted blue swimming pool
Where stars once swam breast-stroke,
And Walter and I now contemplated astronomical sales.
People sued, but that was expected
even among the good guys.
However and hereinbefore,
no trademark, patent or copyright infringement
Could catch our legal moonwalk.
I watched as clients entered the pool-house, stage left.
There was a heave in the gabled structure
As they were consumed!
Out came Walter, brimming with contracts
I had copied from genius form-books
Relieved smiles by the swimming pool,
And odes to the 4-cornered prose I composed,
All about “Roll-over tax years,” “Trigger that loan,”
and “Who’s exposed?”
If you ever see the phrase, “Kindly be advised,”
Get out of town
**********
12.
PHAROAH TAKES A TRIP (Doug Knott Ed-Fin 5-25-22)
The secret passageway
Is long and narrow with bas-reliefs.
Great serpents flail on either side
The queen’s head is red
Her breast is white travertine.
Kings and servants proceed with stony verve.
Water-bearers ochre in side panels
Carry only the idea of water,
But reveal love of body and rank
Sand mixes indefinitely
with prayers all gone to dust,
bathing the stores of dried dates, golden trinkets
and dead servants, now bones, Pharoah will
need in the timeless afterlife
where his sun always boasts a victorious campaign
and the Nile is the gallery of the known world
Whether the world goes up or down
Pharoah sleeps in painted incarnation
with gods like angels of prey roosting
on his sunset-colored barge.
No captain but the hour-glass
This barge was built
Not to sail on water
But through time
******
13.
I Learn the Con on W 42nd St. (by Doug Knott rev 6-1-2)
Period: mid-60s, about 10 years after publication of Ginsberg’s “HOWL.”
Old West 42ND Street, decades
Before Disney and the mayor ordered cleanup;
The parade of dirty-movie marquees, smut
now sealed in black-and-white photos by time
Time itself a dissipating gas
I sailed through exploring my early self,
And I can say the thrills were cheap indeed
On that street-wand of emotional dilation
A wicked finger off Times Square
My arteries are now blocked for miles
but I thought 42nd St. in the mid-60’s was creepy cool
a block party in the shadow of mid-town ad-men
with locals rampant, and strangers moving fast as fish,
I was from a small town, where people said “How-ya-do”
and didn’t lock their cars
So I was driven by the gravity of perversion
To lift up the floorboards of life and burrow...
Like William S. Burroughs
I know from peep shows, little sex revues
Wood walls that themselves stink,
Bums on too-many-bums row
Staircases you don’t want to go up
People that hate themselves in public,
Places you hear gush and whine through flimsy wall-paper
All sordid -- sordidity itself was the theme,
Not sex, no satisfaction.
XXX equals zero
This was not porn, but threat of porn with twist of crime.
A gorgeous setting for self-recrimination.
I had to ground myself
in fervent long-johns and empty groin
Un-satisfied by any of the sexual organs tottering in front of me.
Those marquees just echoed staked-out gasps of fantasies
Everyone knew were fake
Like a tour of Hollywood Universal in LA –
fake piled on fake.
There I mingled with hustlers
In line for construction jobs, no less --
And a guy nudged me in a short line,
This guy in a smudged fedora and nose like a pickle
told my 19-year-old self
He would give me back my 10 bucks
I had just handed him (because I wanted a friend),
And he wanted some quick medicine,
Heart stuff... This standing in the freezing wind
was getting to his bones
“Meet ya over der at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant” –
It gleamed chrome back on Broadway
with an aura of companionship.
“I‘ll give ya the 10 back, plus fried eggs and spuds for interest” --
(Remember how Jack himself used to show up in the back room?
the former heavy-weight champion of the world – in person!
Glazing it over with admirers of the ring)
And this guy said – “When Jack comes out at 11am you’ll get it back.”
So little me was there! But I found out:
(Jack only came out after midnight
and no one showed at 11am because they never did.)
And I considered that I learned about 42nd street
The easy way, and actually quite cheaply
And that street’s hustlers and whores,
barkers, strippers and pickle-face fedoras
Now only appear on internet sites
(where they are bigger and more sordid than they ever were on 42nd)
Maybe Jack was coming out, after all.
Maybe I’d get my 10 bucks back, and be recognized
like the man I was becoming,
Maybe this crowd boiling like pasta penne
with old bones thrown in the pot
outside the steamed-up window of Jack Dempsey’s place
that cast reflections of sin --
Maybe this thin New York
winter sunlight of nuclear ambition
that embraces light and dark, sordidity and sanctitude --
Maybe this black-and-white historic hat-brim photo I make in words
That crowd boiling over their own feet
includes a little egg of me
(END)
14.
Lesson in Conversational Portuguese (By Doug Knott – Ed-Fin V. 5/25/22)
After a prayer meeting with the spurting of chicken blood
In the dusty and livid interior of Brazil
The father of the saints (pae dos santos)
Who had killed the chicken
Earlier that afternoon
Took a liking to me
“Voce tem o preconceito mistico?” -
“Are you of the mystical persuasion?”
“Tenho, sim,” I said – “Sure, of course, dude”
“Entao, eu so faco bem” – “I just do good,” he said,
In a juicy morse-code flicker of offering
That raced over my heart like a fleet of gazelles
“Mas si voce quiser mal” – “But if you want ‘the bad,’
I know someone who can help”
I declined, with some regret at opportunity lost
In the quick tropical sunset
Reversed and flat like a bed-sheet –
But I had respect for this father of umbanda
Like the toad has for the wheel
“Voce tem o preconceito mistico?”
On the chair, my hands shook like bamboo
Of course, I have seen the fountains go out in someone’s eyes
And the struggle under the skin
I follow the run-away heart;
In Brazil, I got into a big taxi-cab
And got the hell out of there
When I got far away, I felt backwards behind me
And he was still there, a faint lamp on a dark street
With the air slightly twitching around him
And in my wallet was a fresh card that did not exist.
It said: “Eu so faco bem” – “I only do good.”
******
15.
Home Movie in Green and White (by Doug Knott Rev 6-1-21)
The pale house with the green shutters open
Let the afternoon sun into the room
Where I hit my sister in the head
With a baseball bat
Not during the official season
But during the eternal season of the child
Shutters agape, the ball flew out
Like a random pistol shot
That yet held the whole house hostage;
The windows shook like birdcages
With small birds trying to get out.
I foolishly tried to hang on inside
The sloping bluegrass lawn fell down
Before the street; my father
Rolled down the new-mown grass, drunk
With the neighbor’s wife in his arms
Both of them laughing
Covered with little green blades
I put the baseball bat back in the closet
And the house settled on a new foundation
Slightly closer to hell
*******
16.
Queen of Thin Air
People move slowly on the slopes
of Whitney as if underwater, express
surprise that I’m old and still a-grunting –
body a hyper-ventilating machine
fashioned from mortal sticks, will-
power pellets, self-denied dreams,
forgotten lust, muscles that hold
personal trauma like hot dog buns –
and a desire for transcendence from it all!
Or I wouldn’t even be here
stuck like an insect on God’s bulletin board
with spires and twisty necks
of rock. And such a long way down.
I pursued a bogus casual agenda
to a bargain-basement realization –
This jagged stairway banded with slick ice
might lead to a tremulous afterlife.
The day’s dark blue and disappearing in
the giddy void. I lift and crook up rock
and more rock, going sideways in halls
of shimmering granite, past spaceships
of stone ribbed in ice, and me outside
desperate for air.
Inhale breath, thin as rock is thick.
Dare not take eyes off booted feet.
Hand grabs an angle of stone, eyes
stare far upstairs into the birdless
blue smile of the queen of thin air
in whose cobalt presence mere lungs
expire and unbodied souls intone
“Welcome to Vertigo
The state without any boundaries at all.”
17.
Smart-Ball (Rev 9-3-21 Doug Knott)
I’m the king of shadows hanging out
With all mankind on the sunny side
of the globe, like a fortune cookie
You find sometime when you feel brilliant
And want to play Smart-Ball –
What did I say when I found out there wasn’t any End,
and no one can say what’s Real?
That God was so smart he invented history -
In his big old bang chair with the dark and greasy arms
He let me hang on to my subway map, bong and interior violence
So I could play Smart-Ball with vigor
Like a fervent mass in a cloud chamber
Somewhere between particle and wave.
We all need heroes, and I quote
The late famous physicist with the wheel-chair and talk-box;
The wiggly lines coming out of him revealed
Space warps in the presence of matter --
And gravity is love between stars.
Length, width, height and time --
That guy had Big Bang shrapnel in the brain.
Such an expert at Smart-Ball!
I thought I’d gained the ability
to at least stand up to myself,
But I had lied to my own diary,
mostly about my psychic ability.
When I read my own red-green-and-yellow aura, I said
My mind is a series of punitive self-images,
And I’m a prisoner of words and grammar.
When I talked I thought I was tap-dancing
How they hide the truth about schizophrenia,
Which is that two heads are better than one,
And being bipolar -- might give you one for free!
Best bargains are had choosing a new body-mind
between life-times --
That’s how you win at Smart-Ball
*****
18.
Kansas City Boilo-Boilo (by Doug Knott Ed-Fin 5/26/22)
Old KC on the bluffs of the Missouri
verdant and pecked by the carnivorous sun.
On perilous vast old brick factory heights
appear faded names painted 10 feet high
like “Equip.,” “Co.” and “Bagley & Sons” –
This is a working town, a union town
A pause in the torpid middle of things,
Old frame houses and lump-stone bungalows
lean back into the past,
while sunlight pours down like
fried chicken-steak gravy on this
Humid world left over from American Eden
And inside Mama’s restaurant, we traveling poets,
Fresh and agile on tour of the Mid-west
fill up on high-class carbohydrates
and sweat even in the air-conditioning.
While salt, ketchup and red Tabasco
bomb down on eggs, bacon and fries,
we cluck over the table about our hero
The endless forever Jack Kerouac,
and how they didn’t honor him
in Lowell, Mass., city of his birth,
until his name made goddamn money –
goddamn bastards!
We all visit Charlie “Bird” Parker’s flat white grave
In the old “Lincoln cemetery for Negroes” muffled by green stallion oaks.
Remember how the coroner said, “I thought he was 60,”
When Bird’s inner saxophone burst at 34?
Today we go our own ways:
Scott, the sage of Florence, Ore., visits
Satchel Paige in the Negro Baseball League museum.
Mike and Mike go groove on the paintings of
Thomas Hart Benton in his own stone house museum.
Huge oil paintings with fields of wheat
heaving around in the wind
like bleached-out pompadours on 50’s hipsters,
all the figures curvy and bent over
in gusts that exist only on canvas.
Speakeasy gangster clouds
hang out over the horizon all boilo-boilo.
But I read Benton as the straight-ass art teacher
of alcoholic, attenuated Jackson Pollock
who took his giant step off the cliff of art --
we should all be so lucky to tumble like that.
And it’s me who wants to surf barbeque joints
To go to 18th and Vine, and the year 1932
when KC was the jazz capital of the continent,
if not the jazz-borne nicotine world.
Paint fades, but energy lingers
in the old signs and marquees,
though no human can be seen –
except that rusty old codger in the short-brim fedora
who watches me take photos,
his folding chair leaning back
into the black wall shadows
in Kansas City, MO --
where it’s 101 in the shade
By heart-aching loops of the broad Missouri,
long-distance cold-water runner from the Rockies, and --
America’s loneliest river
*****
19.
Flaneur New York (Doug Knott Ed-Fin 5-31-22)
Today I walk happy and alone
Amid benches and left-over folk,
Their bottles and blankets,
Listening for the tip-toe of the heart
Being an artist and boulevardier
At large, I revel in
the pleasure of every glance.
Each gaze, averted or direct,
Into another’s eyes
Is a door into summer or sorrow
A tune grazes my ear
It bursts into song that stomps off --
Love is too temporary
To remember those words
I have words, but no place to stay,
Except a worried couch downtown.
Nearby voices boil up to my ear,
along with steam radiators,
Friendly shouts, trucks that grunt.
A rush-hour pileup of gears and horns
Even a lucky rent-control apartment makes a person
A prisoner of this city – where rooftops, watertanks, gargoyles and now video cameras observe even dog-walkers,
reelers, power-people getting somewhere advanced,
lovers hunched against a wall
And I am a butterfly of mental flaps
A pseudo-plane with pastel wings, perched
on a moment of the impossible –
Under the sky’s breathless blue lung
Central Park‘s an enormous secret
With grass growing on top
*********
20.
THE AWARE WOLVES (By Doug Knott Ed-Fin 6-1-22)
To the aware wolves belong
The space between ghosts
And night of eggplant dark
The moon, itself a wandering soul,
Peers through tree-tops
At my heart – a deer frozen
In a forest of eyes, lupine
And shaped like leaves
I know they are near
I hear them when they call
My name. Summoning me
Is entertainment
At my own expense
They lope alongside me
And when I look at them
Their eyes get bigger
I treat them now as my children
Feed them everything I have.
And at night I draw these friends around me
and look up at the moon
Awash in darkness, and hunger is
A long wail in the night
*******
21.
O.J.’s Photography Joke (Rev 9-19-21 by Doug Knott)
Mid-90’s between the trials
O.J. sat alone at the bar in Santa Monica,
His high point because he had just been acquitted
Of the murders, and the civil suit was still in his pocket.
Everybody knew him
so I made no small talk: like, “Are you Mr. Simpson...? (Duh)
“Can I have my picture taken with you?” I asked instead,
Loving the thrill of edge and notoriety.
No one had any doubt he had killed his blonde wife
and the young man with the round glasses
So I sat down next to a double murderer
In a haze of celebrity that drifted like cigar smoke
My butt safe in a public bar
And O.J., courteous and lavish with demeanor of a crime boss
Said, “Sure, my man,” and flipped his alligator hand
clasping my shoulder like a buddy on TV.
I called my friend from the other room
To take a photo with my disposable camera -
Me with the Heisman football trophy winner
Presently holding off the biggest murder rap in the world
And the damn photo flash wouldn’t go off!
As an amateur photographer
I know you need flash to shoot black people in gloomy rooms
because pre-digital film goes dark quicker than the eye
“Take it again and make sure that flash works!” I exclaimed,
And O.J., whose side-gig was comic movie acting, said,
“I won’t take that as a racist remark --- ”
Quite a specific photography joke
He was in great humor and charisma
And folded me close to him for the photo.
I felt the strength of muscles hard as a python
A great athlete gone jealous and feral
Now strutting around in public, because --
that’s show-biz!
And me too -- I was the fan-boy, now with souvenir
A photo located in an album now in storage
all light-smeared because my friend
Bobbled the camera, but you can see
Me and O.J. in a bright circus of nostalgia
I even felt high from his charisma
which my friend picked up on
and he wanted to have his picture taken,
so we went back into the bar
But O.J. had shape-shifted through a silent back door --
Except he made loud news when jail finally came --
And now he’s out with old-man jowls, a limp
and the Mark of Cain on his forehead –
And like Cain, no one can touch him
because he’s the artist of the broken field
Who ran through football, the woman, public opinion,
His own conscience, the sentence and the jail,
All the way to that bar with me in Santa Monica
And even I thank him
for that polite moment between murder trials
*******
22.
The Thomas Fire (by Doug Knott Rev 9-3-21)
11pm power kaput in the house.
Emotion revs like a race-car.
Sudden dark – flashlight where?
Walk outside - no sound, only
Mulch crunch. No car, no one.
Turn corner, OMG, brilliant stage lights blasting on the ridge –
It must be Hollywood! What, no director?
From left to right a yellow horizon --
It’s Genghis Khan with his golden horde
A thousand arms of leopard swords.
Fire loves wind and rides to the ocean
On wind, a great horse
Stars hide behind a curtain of fog and smoke
all ruddy and gold, reflecting incendiary baths below.
Bright yellow seizures of light on the hillsides.
Our lives gasp and are juicy underneath.
Get out of here, get out of here – and keep in mind,
No power, no gas pump til Thousand Oaks.
I bust out of Ojai down the 33
Breathing like an animal on four wheels
Horses of fire race on the high left side
And all the little trees who couldn’t run and so combusted
Are illuminated hair-doos screaming: “you can’t stop this” --
They’ll be sticking out like black snaggles
Where the fire horses of Genghis
Went crazy and dragged civilization over the hill.
What’s a fire but a thousand visitors who don’t pay
And leave their black clothes all over the floor?
23.
Apology to Greta Thunberg. How about that Climate Change? (Doug Knott 12-7-19)
You’re right, kid!
We spent it, we drove it,
we burned it, we fueled it
We bought it, we rode it,
But we didn’t pay for it –
Didn’t know it was your future, too -
We are your distinguished elders
And came of age just before the peak of the wave
and we’ve surfed it to the shore, rolling in like pearls.
We’re the coolest, we didn’t even work for it,
it just got laid on us by the big living earth Gaia -
“Yes” - she said, “take my breast”
and we took her blood, skin and bones, too.
And our generation has enjoyed every possibility of living
whatever we want, wherever we choose to go.
We are the party of freedom - meaning
we partied with freedom
Now we’re those hard-boiled eggs in the sunset
What do you want from us?
Please deliver your rage to our chattering class,
We are the tribe - the human tribe –
And we welcome you to this fat-ball planet
Where we’re all born out of God’s Word
And when we get hungry
We go out on the crinkle-bulgy landscape
and kill kill kill a big elephant to feed our tribe.
Lots of meat meat meat we eat eat eat
Then dance pray fuck – then pray fuck dance
Afterwards, sleepity-sleep.
Then... get up, have coffee -- and make civilization! –
hammocks, clay pots, sexy figurines of gods,
Broadway plays - we create a world of light and dark
Sex, poetry, ocean-going plastic, capitalism, terrorism, religion
A house fantastic for us alone!
O throw open the green shutters of the world, and
make it brown and naked.
Enough – We hungry again!
Let’s get another elephant --
Or at least an In-and-Out Burger
There’s always more food, isn’t there?
It will all work out ...somehow
There will be a solution ...somehow
But somehow, all that gets fuzzy when I try to think about it.
I can’t shoot that hoop of what to do
You say the only way is massive political action
No oil, and don’t eat nothing in plastic?
Not a chance, even if everyone else does it!
Who helps who control who?
The earth is so stressed digesting us
Where can it shit, except on you?
So sorry, we knew, but didn’t know
and now you know, but what to do?
Also there is no individual guilt,
We’re all absolved and complicit.
All I ever did was drive my car and turn on
the house-lights and some air-con --
Me such a tiny, ordinary consumer!
In case the planet might shrug us off
You might consider the intrinsic death-wish of the species.
And all that plastic in the guts of whales?
We share the gifts.
Climate change is a spiritual vaccination
For those of us on the edge of the afterlife.
The seas will rise, the continents fall
I thought I’d never live to see it happen,
But I was wrong.
*********
24.
Sunset Strip Self-Improvement Affirmations (By Doug Knott Ed-Fin 6-2-22)
There is always the feeling of wind
Even when there is no wind
The coat wants to turn up
Young women in tight black clothes
Project cold blond sex
Slip out in gum-chewing 3’s and 4’s
From dark fertility-cars
They are fires waiting to jump
Fire-lanes, to enter the music smog
In the club owned by the famous movie actor
In front of which the famous kid movie-star
Fell down and died from too much good will
And chemical thrills from his good friends.
On the sidewalk his fans built home-made altars
Like kalideoscopic Mexican gods
With flowers in their hair
The guys take off their shirts
And show their tattoos at closing time
In front of the tattoo store.
The girls look at them with smiles like eclipsing planets.
All the way down in their bellies
Their faces turn up to the stars
People drive more wildly on this street,
Holding phones to their ears in their cars.
Figures on big billboards peer down
Like a row of giants on a drawbridge
Who appear intimate but are
Secretly filing for divorce
And the “Whiskey” and the “Roxy”
Feature rock bands that are named after
Toilets, boomerangs and kitchenware;
And I want a motorcycle -
I’ve never had a motorcycle
And everybody here is a little bit behind,
Or in front of, the cameras.
In the bookstore, I stood in line
Beside Donald Sutherland, one of my favorite actors,
And I almost vaulted the aisle to grab his arm
And tell him how much I admired his work, particularly in
Nicholas Roeg’s dark Venetian drama.
But I held back my racing heart
To give him space to breathe alone
In the illusory world where he is not recognized.
In the gas station I pump gas
Next to the formerly famous male model
With the blond hair extensions and big pectorals
Whom they never let speak in public;
I knew it was him when a girl with a narrow ticket face
Approached and pulled his autograph while we pumped
And I said, ‘It’s you, right, you’re that movie guy?”
And he said, “No, not him,” and I said “OK,”
Because it was wonderful enough to me that he denied it,
But then he stood behind me to pay at the cashier
And I turned and said again, “You’re that movie guy,
Aren’t you?” And he said “Yes, it’s me, it’s me,
It’s me’ -- and we were both gratified.
I had just seen this male model
As a standup comic cardboard cut-out
In the greeting-card store window up the street
This is the city of movies, not ‘films’ –
Of package, persuasion and negative pickups
In the financing of all life, including executives
Who seek preference in restaurant seatings
Like packs of militant seals.
And this is the street that serves up
Its own name as part of the deal.
Sunset Boulevard in the dog-breath night!
The long cars line up in lacy steel brocade
Outside the restaurants loaded
With people who generate international states of mind
And dubious cultural symbols –
And it’s time for the hit-men, the pitch-men,
The agents and the one-line guys
To roll the big cameras like dice
And no one forgets to be seen leaving a substantial tip
Under the wheels - which roll down this street
Walking distance from the health food store,
Hustler, the all-night gym, and many fine hotels
The traffic lights blink and automobile shadows
Move across me; it’s the movie
That kicks in when I close my eyes:
It’s the movie where I’m always the star --
Waiting for the light to change
Waiting for the big change
City of stars,
Neighborhood of strangers
It will happen for me...
It will happen for me...
It will happen for me...
It will happen for me...
************
25.
Forgotten Museum (by Doug Knott Ed-Fin 6-3-22)
Sit with me a while
On this green park bench
My friend, the artist
I’ll hold you while --
we grow older.
You just had an opening
And people you didn’t even know
Got inside you
You’re an artist, so
I understand.
You’ve opened your lungs;
A big exhale can be overwhelming
You can rest on me like a raft.
The risk of exposure –
What’s the pay-off, cringe or preen?
I can see your face
Blossom out on that thankless plain
Nobody sees the leaves grow around us,
This park bench with overcoat of green.
Join me under the covers
Of smiles, daubs of forever green
And past lovers, now solitary,
fuming with dreams
******
26.
Silver by Doug Knott
I see its starry swath
Trail off in the air
As I polish knives and spoons
Years ago I polished kitchen silver
With a Tibetan Lama Rinpoche
Who spit, and rubbed
And showed me the magic sparks that fly
From the ends of forks and knives,
And then he whispered,
“And do you know what
is the most beautiful thing in the world?”
He smiled like a jade gate.
“It is – the woman.”
I was both stunned and pleased
And thought that he
Was either a really wise man
Or a very good comedian
And I have carried the buried ax-handle
Of this knowledge until tonight
As I watch you
Take off your clothes
And gusts of night-metal fly
Off your body.
You turn, and the silver trap within me
Snaps shut at the core
27.
The Vineyards of Fresno
It’s a harbor in this green world
My metal folding chair on the edge
Of the scraped earth; the shadow
Cast down by the mulberry tree
All crazy with moving leaves
Shelters me as I skip my thoughts
Like flat rocks over incoming
Green legions of vines
The old man who owned these vineyards
Died two months ago; suddenly, his
Soul hissed off from this hot earth.
His niece, the lawyer from the big city
Is here to search the sullen oceans
Of papers on the floor; papers angry
At being disturbed; the old man
just walked over them.
“There is the sun, and there
is the way out,” he must have said
as he clambered over the hills of bills
and invoices cluttered on the dark floors,
strangle-weeds of farm business underfoot.
And now he reaches the door
And now holding on to the light,
He enters the laughing green circus of vines.
28.
I BECOME SURREAL AT AN ART OPENING (By Doug Knott Rev 12-24-18)
I don’t look for truth around here
People live quite happily without it
Going around each other in their long forms
Even though they are standing still
Just now I was talking to
Someone I didn’t know
And their face fell off
And my face fell off
Our expressions rolled
In pieces at our feet.
My watch still worked.
Otherwise I was out of time.
Contrary to popular opinion
Most of the people in this room
Are quite innocent
They have not heard
Of themselves yet
29.
REVERSE-WORLD (by Doug Knott Ed-Fin 6/3/22)
She wanted a willow tree and got a hammer
a coverlet of stars and got a suitcase
-- of chaos, no less
She wanted a machine that made furniture
And got one that played emotional music
One of me was enough.
Good feels bad, and bad feels good.
The king of winds pulled out the ice-card
And pointed me true north –
Even though I started out inside the sun
Nuclei distended and popping.
Hot desire in solar flares.
That was a vacation
The door going “in” was marked “out”
But she pushed hard
And I got through
**********
30.
WALK like an EARLY MAN (Doug Knott)
Walking like an early man into the pandemic every day
Feels like jungle with white, transparent trees
The way the days blur into each other
The world transmutes without a snap
I forget doctor appointments
The growing death toll
Deliberate dementia in social media
And the economy –
How about Wall St. sticking up there like a liquor-store sign?
Get ready for the sucker-punch.
Schools open or closed, mask or no-mask?
Will the kids be held back?
Do I want to be a schmuck and keep moaning?
Freedom
Is our national shadow
Nobody better tell anybody what to do
The white permission of the endless frontier --
We could just run away from it all!
But it’s already gone;
They want to suspend the laws,
destroy elections and democracy.
We’re the hung-up ones
Suspended on a trapeze of TV
How do we get out
And when is gravity
going to take hold?
*****
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