Back to Berkeley

Freshmen line up for cannabis authorization letters

Every September the city renews its license to locate Bedlam 

Time to hit the books

And chase the dragon

All summer long busy

With the roof to the new monstrosity

Adding to the glare

Under drought conditions 

with the thermometer at eighty degrees,

It's as if the trees are about to burst into flames

A cool overcast day is more than welcomed

Meanwhile the Post Office remains unsold

Guy atop the recycled junk bear downtown

Kids recite their poems at the Watershed festival,

These two boys just read and were well-received

Another day at the People's Park

People can convene there

They can line up at the Food Not Bombs table

And receive an appetizing and healthy meal for free

An apartment building on Dwight near Telegraph

Many a poet crossed this threshold

For an after-reading soiree upstairs

It's a place where you are encouraged

To be who you want to be

Rejecting repression and conformity

Some land on the border of savagery

So why not sport a jaunty hat
and parade around

on Hallowe'en?

September 2015

The Semiotics of Waterfront Park Berkeley

 

 The meadows are withered and seer

Endgame on this worrisome drought

May El Nino wash it away 

fill the reservoirs and make the snow pack mount

Guess where I was yesterday

 Walking my way through the signs

 This one is my all time favorite

 Warning: large glowing grasshoppers

 All of West Berkeley is a fiction where the Bay was

And will again be before very long

 And where we're going today...

 Is meta-fictional

 To rect-ambulate the entire rombus

Land built on trash dumped in the Bay

 A map designed to look aboriginal

 Apparently if you feed the wildlife

they crap all over everything

 Bird housing

 I am an I-island

 The way we came 

 

 A few brief showers

there's always hope

 Here in the dry dry fields

 It's like a Nagasaki cemetery

 Here for solitude peace and awe

 The future is written in clouds

 A snake carcass in the grass

 Succulents, 

these flowers less often in white

 Our ever-expansive vantage on the bay

 A sudden greensward

Something underground

 There's one of those fat ground squirrels

with two of his bitches,

Not even afraid of me

 Man's got a right to fish for his supper

 My second most favorite sign

 Forget it, sailor

 Boating allowed

 The Berkeley marina

 A common garden

 Berkeley attraction

 This is the electric color more generally encountered

Host to our beloved bee

 Au revoir, Miss Farallones

 Someday

Nothing left but to await my bus

Feet up on a bench in the breezy sunlight

25 September 2015

September Sunset Terminal

1.

Sunset junkie

First day of autumn

Portents coming on 

 Addictions are mere habit-formation

 When you live up in the sky you're never lonely

The moon is my room mate

My soul has been psychedelicized

23 September 2015

2.

They keep calling me 

When the saints come marching in





Another night

 another phantasmagoric autumn sunset sky 

It became like unto molten gold,

The biblical miraculous

 

After this the cloud squadrons turned

sacramental purple 

as they faded into night

24 September 2015

3.

Into the ethereal 

I promise myself I'll stop

...soon

25 September 2015

4. 

Anatomy of a sunset

 It begins in golden yellows

 Next the pinkening occurs

Then the sky shows pink

29 September 2015

 Lucky old sun

See you next September

30 September 2015