(Inspired by a photograph City Lights Bookstore (1969) by Hammond Guthrie.)
Backs turned, and pedestrians, tourists, sailors, and naturalized citizens of San Francisco fade like old black and white photos
as they wander past epicenter, the great tsunami of literary movement.
Eyes cast down with shoulders hunched over from the weight of obscenity laws and artistic repression, overdoses of reality tv and rape cloaked in salvation hidden under altar boys’ gowns, annihilation of a people disguised as liberation and the destruction of the planet as the pipe dreams of politically motivated science, while the chemical seduction of Xanax, and Ambien finds deeply hidden synapses and the promise of a better day, they remain silent.
City Lights up darkened corner so naysayers and dying cabbies, poets and drunks, bodhisattvas and youth with abscessed arms waking up as hungry ghosts, wife beaters and psychopathic CEOs, old Chinese shopkeepers and Italian restaurateurs
can cross each others path like particles of cosmic energy that dance invisibility in our mists.
Rhymes and rhythms and stanzas and words twist and turn and make their pronouncements out the door from up on the 2nd floor and permeate and penetrate and lay gently upon all the nameless San Francisco orphans as they seek out long lost cradle, and midnight feeding of the swollen breast, hurdling themselves toward green pastures, broken box cars, potter’s field, Shanghai respite, and tidy old age homes
as they, with poems yet unspoken upon their lips disappear into the cool dark night.
Frank Sorensen © 2009
Elemental
You say air fuels fire as it coaxes and caresses
and dancing flames move to Zydeco beats
under hot Louisiana sun
and cool breezes lay brush strokes across bodies
soaked from primal gyrations
carried by the currents of sweet air
squeezed out of ancient accordion
fingered by hands shaped by the dark African nights.
Words weave beads of silk across your lips
igniting memories of comings and goings
and fire gives shape to air.
Frank Sorensen © 2009
Haiku #4
Death rattle echoed
as their laughter came to rest
in green fields of corn.
Frank Sorensen © 2009
