Berkeley Shade of Winter

Mostly Cloudy

and cool

Fog Holler

playing on Shattuck

in downtown Berkeley

The Winter sun

House on Blake street

Authentic Bluegrass

musicians from Hawaii

home of steel pedal guitar

Must seem cold here

note the fingerless

fingering gloves

Winter house

not clearly visible

in the leafy months

 of the year

Both were very talented

but the banjo player was the star

His rather prominent skull

with thin surface topology

He looks blue and lonesome

plaintive and tragic

deep river blues

Woodstock is still playing

at the Pacific Film drive-in

Starving Artist guitar shop

Berkeley is a guitar town

Banjo a wagon wheel

 a steam boat wheel

The guitar can be anything

Sometimes you just have to,

row, row, row your boat

on old man river,

But that's a different genre

slower but not sadder

 We were having light rain,

Scant snow in the mountains

all the rain we can get

The sun plows across

a dark embankment








2.
Mostly Sunny
and Mild



Rule by vintage Fiat

Some folks have to make

a home out in the wind

Remarkable
hair colors
mais non au naturel

 Low-slung birdhouse
front yards of another
part of town



Looking under the skirt
of a tremendous redwood
on Grant

Kids around here
like their toys
to be weird

The quills have eyes


Uncloudy Day
Mildness

Wall of Peace tile
in re-opened
Civic Center park

Berkeley is a center
of back to the land
primitive socialism

Ironic isn't it
The joke's on both
of us

Lifestyles based on
the Romantic West
persist even today

Arrayed under
 the inspiration
of tall old trees

After thought

Not happy about the new

BART cattle cars,

More doors fewer seats

and hard ones at that

Standing room begins early

amid skinhead biker mayhem

last week in January 2018

Berkeley Winter Break

A strange hiatus

in strained times

in an estranged city



Let's have a look


An appreciable lack
of crowds and traffic
Busses and streets
 not over-crowded for once



A girl with proverbial
hair like honey


Across from the fenced-off
park downtown
The Berkeley Historical Society





Artifacts
of the original Psychedelic era
Spotlight on the Berkeley sound









Golden Gingko
on campus by the creek

The creek swollen

with rain at last

A virtual vision

a flashback to the creek

as it was in centuries past

or a precognition

of how it will again be

I headed off through the trees

to the vicinity of the art museum

But first

Fortune smiled and a girl

had a light for me blunty

It's wet and chilly today

but every January since I moved

to California I sigh with relief

when I hear how cold it is 

 in icy Massachusetts

where I'm from

Especially when it's

nine below zero

and it's 3 o'clock

in the afternoon

Ignore the pretentious

status seekers

arrogant grad stews

identity policians

 Take Berkeley

 as it is

When in Woodstock

do as Woodstocks do

Sophistication and

schizophrenia

can help

Like pearls

and a simple black dress

There's a slim

cadre of Communists

He's always up for it

Asian girls are passionate

Woman in the Dunes

I did a paper on the film

and the novel by Kobo Abe

One long Japanese 

When Harry Met Sally

psycho-delicatessen scene

A priest

caught in the act

From Tantric yoga

to countless celibate

 religious orders,

The orgasm,

to be or not to be

Same old

Samo

Everyone says they

have  a new idea

a throbbing eye-ball bulb

How few come true

No sitting on the fence

when it comes to

Net neutrality

Tear down

Trump's wall

Lenin is

gonna be Lenin

December 2017-January 2018