Thursday, December 22, 2011

Happy Birthday, Kenneth Rexroth



Happy Birthday, Kenneth Rexroth
(December 22, 1905 - June 6, 1982)

Blurry nights over Japanese poetry...
girls on the scrounge for bread or love.
Later you open a used book shop
on San Francisco's Union Street,
make an easy dollar off review copies.
Ginsberg howls and steals your acolytes.
Marthe runs off with Creeley.
You dogpaddle into the deeper
inky waters of haiku,
suffer academic parties
(lamp shades on skulls)
in Santa Barbara.  Now the grave
facing the blue-green Pacific.
Small wonder that tonight
a couple of soft-belly
gloom-eyed poetry slammers
will spill wine over your words.



Note: Happy Birthday, Kenneth Rexroth, with many other bio-sketch poems, is included in Red Shuttleworth's Ghosts & Birthdays, a book published by Humanitas Media Publishing in 2012... available on Amazon.


Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Empty Small Town Hotels

Red Shuttleworth




Empty Small Town Hotels

Empty burgundy bottles, cracked in half
buffalo bone buttons, newspaper sheets filled
with the sporting exploits of Bat Masterson,
the whispers of whitened skeletons serve
as insulation between rotted-bed empty rooms.

At the front desk, you can knuckle wood
until your wrist throbs and not get
a night's rest.  In the summer... warmth.
Come winter... frozen feather pillows.

Doors open and slam shut on their own...
no need for booze-clogged honeymooners.
The dusty first floor cattlemen's restaurant
serves pasture-found Hereford jawbones.
The copper piping's been salvaged.
Potatoes have been hurled through windows.

I'll drive us there next spring.
All that shined yesterday can glow again.
We'll barge in, tip our cowboy hats
to the ladies, sing some Hank Williams,
steal back forsaken years with laughter.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg: Creepy Guy of the Year

Is Mark Zuckerberg's creepy smile
predicated on having turning Facebook
into a tawdry advertising fishwrap?


Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: the strategies of a pedophile:
  1. Hook 'em in with candy.
  2. Abuse 'em with a blizard of ads.
  3. Get 'em to tolerate being abused.

What we can do:

Call or email your congressman.  Ask that Facebook be regulated by the FCC and that it's financial books be opened.

Consult an attorney.  Is it possible there's a class action law suit that could eventually result in Facebook having to pay each  user a dollar for each ad placed on his or her page?

Call for an IRS audit of Mark Zuckerberg and of Facebook.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Happy Birthday, Fyodor Tyutchev



Happy Birthday, Fyodor Tyutchev
(December 5, 1803 - July 27, 1873)

Night-flutter of birds in the pines out front,
like the rustle of a young Bavarian widow's skirt 
as she sits to read a poem of crystal-blue skies,
tender smiles, love and death.  No mention
of a diplomat's dandruff, nor of grumbles
over another man's wildfire-beloved going cold
after application of a new gold wedding band.
You made glossy-best of Russian winters,
wrote warmer poems in Athens, Rome,
and, best of all, with bunioned feet
at play in Swiss lakes. The snowy, rutted roads
to and from the estate, Ovstug, were depressing,
like a smelly maid's oat-colored quivering buttocks.
The poems cried out to be written, but you scrunched
most of them in your fist, saying, We all vanish,
why not my tiny cups of salted watery wine?