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.

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.

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.

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?