More Nostalgia for Last Summer

I had found myself in puzzling circumstances

the Bay furnished my great escape

 Summer of 2013 is revisited yet again by the ever-vigilant sage with an epic memory, your Flaneur. It is said that, whatever else bohemia is, it is always yesterday. The same goes for summertime.

 

 Oakland city of night

with a Necklace of Light

 A city not without its charm

 The night of the day the Supreme Court struck down

 California's discriminatory Proposition 8

a last ray of sunlight on a rainbow flag

 This fellow certainly looked like 

he felt liberated

 Red sails in the sunset,

what would I do without a song?

Feet are big in Oakland

 We take our herbal medicine seriously hereabouts,

federal lawman, watch out

 My ready supplier of chilled bottles of stout

conveniently located near the Ferry landing

 Even Today many have a distorted view of Oakland

  Snowy egrets dig the estuary 

a stone's throw from the highrise skyline

 Christ the Light awaits eternity nearby

Solitude can be very peaceful

And you can always hit a movie

But by all ways and means,

 stay groovy

Summer 2013

Lunar Notes

1.

Full moon over oakland
vague feeling of menace tonight

yellow ivory eyes peer
from an ebony effigy head

deserted courthouse corner
where the darkness craters

blurred people cardboard signs of woe
refuge alongside the cold highway

2.

smirking cops move the port barriers
all the way downtown

forced to walk around
their obstruction

in every petty authority
the glint of the triumph of evil

reversal of the beatitudes
whims of the surveillance state

massive up-link truck
occupies tenth street

phalanx of tautological cops
in combat gear sit in white vans

detoured bus dumps passengers anywhere
under the pummeling helicopters

up broadway first sign of protest
square-dance of people in the street

3.

no more masquerade
american class war out in the open

a nation of bullies
scowls at the less well-off

the negro edged out on a tree limb
already a phantom branch

so many among the over-fed
can't stop won't slow down

scatter pedestrians like urban birds
the snarky cops won't notice

8 September 2014

"Cops Evicted

In the wake of Urban Shield, the police training and trade show staged in Oakland last week, attracting attendees from 200 law-enforcement agencies-- the Mayor announced that it wouldn't be welcome in Oakland again. To exactly nobody's surprise, the event, timed on the heels of Ferguson in a city where cops are probably less popular than anywhere else on the West Coast, drew protests. The police gear fest, which cost $1 million in federal funding, was started by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office." 

from the Bay Guardian,  Sept 10, 2014

So they are using our tax-money to disrupt, disrespect, intimidate, and cause tension in our City.  

We get to underwrite every goose-step on the way to a totalitarian police state

The Deep

Full Moon

September 2014

A Holiday Fairytale

Once Upon a Time...

The Flaneur fell down a rabbit hole on Labor Day---here's what he saw

1.

The Quest

There was ice on Labor Day

A glittering crystal entrance way had appeared

leading to Fairyland

like a wardrobe to Narnia

Fairyland is a nice place to shed some cob webs

To blow away crystal dandelions

(but don't inhale--may contain traces of meth)

Fairyland is the first fantasy-land

and has the oldest puppet theater in the USA

On Halloween the Flaneur buys a trumpet

and on Christmas he gets a drum

Unaccompanied adult Menfolk
 are never admitted to Fairyland,

But the clever Flaneur knows his way in

Book worm got to help a brother, blood

The Flaneur was on his way to see Tum Drum

Who just got a new security system

for his playhouse

2.

The Connection

Tum Drum is an elf

 who was supposed to have mushrooms

His connection is from Hungary

A Wizard named Zev
 learned in all manner of herbs,

 mushrooms, seeds, and buttons,

colour powders and which toads to lick ,

Tum drum and Zev come from Pixieland

which is where all the wee folk live in

Mean old Frisco

They were in Oaktown for a fairy folk festival

Sheila E performed A Love Bizarre,*

Trolls in assless lederhosen weren't invited
There are no dungeons in Children's Fairyland
anymore

3.

Coming On Now

After the Flaneur ate the mushrooms

  The world sparkled both inside and out

 Everything started to look beautiful to him

 Familiar people and things started to look unfamiliar

Associations in his mind were unusual, strange

He thought about the time he shaved himself down there

 His surroundings seemed to lurch toward him

with sort of a pelvic thrust

 People seemed to be looking at him in an odd way

 Then the Flaneur came to an earthen maze

He saw a giant four feet wide,

Suddenly he fell down the rabbit's hole

 4.

Space Odyssey

The Flaneur went down a long corridor

and entered the Kaleidoscope

A prismatic mirror world
a pulsating colour mosaic

  The Flaneur moved through it
 in an aleatory manner 

outside of time

He woke up in a leafy little house

It was a homey home festooned
with garlic and dry rose buds

The Flaneur had never been there before

Afterward it was back into to the cookie jar,

 Mushrooms set in aspic,

 Daydreams set in amber

Epilogue

At dawn Glenda the White Witch of East Oaktown

Came to the Flaneur's window to invite him to return,

She vanished away with the foggy foggy dew

Fairyland really is the far side of the looking glass,
Mother Goose is everywhere at the Lake nowadays
We walk in what she leaves behind 








The End







*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56gpwl6cohc

1 September 2014

additional images: 2011, 2014

Main Street USA

The Flaneur hails from the Narragansett Bay where Aquidneck Island is located. Newport, Rhode Island was a big part of his early saga.

 It was in those days a big Navy town, dyed sailor suit blue. My late father was a Navy man and the sea runs rather deeply in my blood.
From my earliest visits there, I recognized Alameda as a big Navy town as well, although West Coast style and on a  smaller scale. Like Newport it had its Navy base close-down but it still supports a culture which grew out of that era and that environment.

As such it is a threshold to the past that I effortlessly step through to stroll the main drag on the Sunday preceding Memorial Day.

Starting at the far end of town

The three largest liquid bodies in order of size:

The SF Bay, Hetch Hetchy water supply,

and the vast local reservoir of alcoholic beverages

This corner institution is Croll's

 serving tea since 1883

Always a lively scene,

Read the stained-glass sign

Beer is only 5 cents, whiskey only a dime!

For the less anglophile
there's an Irish place across the street--

good to reconnoiter signs of my tribe,

Ronan means people of the sea

A local favorite with kids

still a bit too young for beer

Pacific Pinball Museum 

in all it ponderous glory

You can't play the really antiquated ones

which truth be told seem

like they might be awfully dull

These are what pinball machines looked like 

when I first played them in the 1950s

And these dream machines remain fully operational

Feel like another Belfast?
The plaster patches fill in bullet holes

Just a little building in a nice light,

the kind that falls on you in an earthquake

It's a yard-sale macrame world 

where it seems like it's always

  cocktail hour

So, drink, drink, drink 

drinkyourself under the bridge

Be always drunk

31 August 2014 

Shamrock window August 2013