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.