JEWEL TRANCE

I know something crazy’s going on I don’t know what
but when I’m an apple
when I’m imagining a fountain of jewels pouring out
of the wax loopholes of this night
and nothing relaxes my nerves which sing like cornsilk
tassels
and the man I am leaves me: I

am a bell pepper, I am a quince,
I am the gold leaves
blackening and beginning to ache and a rainbow
silently appears in the night sky
suddenly you look up, What heard it? I can’t count
the bone hours until I am black
until my skin sings with the wings of gulls and air currents
all I know is this redeeming voice
this jewel this ruby this sapphire this emerald this gold skull ring
around human fingers which dissolve into a haunting river.

I wrap myself in the candle of her arm
and hold close to her warm breath
I let myself begin to hum, as the night
closes around me like a cat: and I listen hard ---

the walls are gone, the planets are circling
our earth for a reason
they circle our sun but they circle our earth
I watch them arc in the sky each night
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon pared so thin
I am amazed --- rubies swirl in gold rivers
pouring from loopholes in the night, which fall
into the quivering pool: the waterfall made a gash
in the ferns the foam mixed
with what churns in my nerves, her hair floated, was moss
the salamander smiled on the rockface of the skull
the Phantom wore on his finger: I picked the vine out of air
I tested it, it was strong, it was rooted
in the earth, I pulled up and swung off
I selected another in midair, I was my father
dreaming of Tarzan when he was a boy
(I had a ring with a secret in it ---
a light) I crawled under the house where the ashgray dirt cracked
I heard my mother creaking the floor over my head
I heard my bones crack
I heard the clock tick
I heard the gun cock
I heard the stitches rip
I heard the cobwebs tear placentas and my ring was broken
from the chain, I searched among the ashes for it,
I picked up a string of molecules which led through a dead bird’s
neck,
I followed it like a rosary, a necklace of jeweled
DNA beads, I climbed into the attic, I crept
I slid, I continued to urge
myself through my wounds, the hatred, the kerosene
mixed with urine and sold for whiskey …

I step on tiny mice feet I walk like sparks
which ignite the ground with heartbeats I twinkle
lightly
I am not alone, the night sings to me of the teeth
which reveal blood during the day: during the day the haze
lulls the city; I descend in the Velvet Turtle,
a womb bar, and sit in the naugahyde animal;
dicecups popping against the bar are riot sticks against someone’s
head, clacketing horses running down strikers,
violent laughter, click click
this is the sound of the counter in the man’s hand
as people go out of the museum
Why? Why? My son asks and that is
because the leaves unfurl again in the tormenting clear light –
the white rainwashed eucalyptus against blue sky
the blackbird’s purple and green iridescence, the red eyes
of black coots with white beaks, the swan
I walked up to disrespectfully raised
its cobra neck and snorted a warning
(don’t mess with big birds)

this is the time for jewels, this is the time for swords
this is the time for bows and arrows and leather thongs
this is the time for horses and apples this is the time
for light to ring from the ropes of water thrown with a thud
into the dust
this is the time for thundering hooves
muffled in the dust the turmoil of skin and bones
strung on the testicles of night this
is the time when people begin to lie down and dream of the furs
they have killed for and in which they sleep
this is the time
when wheels click and turn and bells
ring and elevators open
and people drop money into the coke machine
and this is the time when a woman smiles at a man
and this is the time when that man is working on the electrical
system
which powers the computers which process your checks
and he drops a wrench
and blue and yellow sparks weld him into silver forever.

Now everyone is working with flashlights.
This is the time to send out for pizza, this is the time
to get closer, to notice someone
next to you you’ve worked with for two years
because bombs are falling outside this is the time
the arrows sprout
in the boy’s belly in the surf
because our bananas cost lives and this is King Kong’s
pink mouth opening in the night sky dreamed of
by lonely men who create their own loneliness
following a woman inside them they can’t touch, this is
the voyage
Ulysses went on and that I go on
this is the Quest for the Holy Grail, this is the fingering
of the bloody robe of Christ, this is the putting on of the
priest’s collar
and the ruby and diamond ring of the pimp –
this is the sable around the neck of the Eskimo woman
who lives in the snow, the woman who chews leather
all day and makes clothes so the man can hunt
seals and skin whales and this is when he feels the blue
revolver
of an oil pipe slide beneath his fingers replacing the woman:
this is the story of the grandpa who walked
and walked and walked because his wife was in love with
her brother
this is the story of two men emasculated by their wives’
older brothers
and who let their gift for language go
who lost the dream their mother gave them: this is
me and I’m walking along dreaming of what I finger:

This is the rosary they prayed for the conversion of Russia
which clicked tickertape from the stock market
but was the DNA chain: nucleotides floated
in the warm oceans of my cells: ribosomes opened
to receive amino acids according to the tender voice which sang
along the silver bloodwire of the endoplasmic
reticulum: the zipper twisted apart and black strings pulled
the spider off the mirror and two cells
moved:
ruby cytosine, sapphire guanine, emerald thymine, diamond
adenine, each found its mate
in the snow which fell
silently around the Eskimo couple on top of the world.

The sky is blue
dreams are given to color and everything tells itself forever.
The things we have to get used to are not supposed to ever
be gotten used to. I don’t want to get used to blood
which pours from the snows of my forehead, in the form of oil.
I don’t want to get used to the eye of the man
napalmed by accident on the last day of the war
whose eye tilted like a fish eye, a specific fish eye
which I killed, a six foot sailfish which fed the pigs.

I won’t ever get used to this blood and shit.
I don’t believe death is senseless. Those planets
orbit our earth for a reason and that reason
is this harmony of skin, it contains power in music
and we are shutting off the music in the pipes.
I know a man who has lost and I know I have lost.
I won’t ever get used to the catastrophe of killing stars
by making sparks against a person’s skin
which ends up like the lady addicted to shock therapy.

The lion’s eyes are rubies
in the night sky they are voices of dead poets
they are my ancestors their bones are jewels and
they speak to me tonight. A meteor
averaged a diamond every thirty square inches: a hunk of iron
full of diamonds fell out of the night sky. Why?

Copyright © SF 1973 Gene Berson

KOREAN WOMEN WARMED ME WHEN I WAS COLD

The women climbed
out of the valley, their loose white clothing swollen
by January wind, climbed
up to where I sat alone on the frozen ground
minding that stupid radio, listening
to the river rushing in the headset, 106’s
firing idiotically over the knoll, came
to collect wood and cardboard from the ammo boxes
built a fire
encircled it, squatting & turning, one
after the other their brown faces, giggling & waving at me
to come over & get warm, yes, not too far from the DMZ
those women squeezed me in, teased me in
amongst them,
around that fire on that empty freezing hill
talking a language I couldn’t understand
our warmth translating every word.

RISKING THE GAUNTLET OF ROBINS

Green inch worms descend
from the canopy on a thread
to leaf litter where they
wildly throw themselves around

as if panicked for direction
yet are rooted on four rear feet
to then scrunch forward
in some bewildering quest.

After a few days – a gossamer
of colors nick the pine needles

colors that startle you
like Van Gogh’s prisoner in the painting,
were he to look up, instead of just
going round and round shackled
to his orbit of gloom, look up the tower
to a few bricks near the window
that refracts beams into a rainbow --

Unseen beneficence, light
awaiting the evolution of eyes.

Grass Valley
April, 2007

THE WHITE TRUCK

I call the white truck
I call the ashes
I call the black silt on the sill, I call the wrinkled coal-like
nuggets of black flies,
I call the screen, the smog haze
THE TOUCH WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE
Of what is touched,
I call the sand against my fingers,
I call the woman home, I call the trees and red lights
I call the hatred, the hawks
Out of chuckholes in the asphalt, I call them to shake off
Their wet sparks and ignite my shirt which is wet
I call the mouths speaking new myths
Full of waxed paper and styrofoam cups, I call all the dead
And living confusion together into my mouth
The tires and residue, the indigestible trash
I call my voice to burn it all in purification
And I am senseless with its quivering impulse:

I call my fingers on these keys
The mothers of my cries: I call this room to open it
I call something from nothing
I call spasms and sputtering plugs full of rage and violation,
I call this nation. How deep can the seams be in the skin?
Sometimes I feel like Frankenstein just after they sewed him
together
And I stumble for simple recognition like a drunk fool full of need
Because I’m so much ignored,
I feel like a tender pool inside
I see the fear in their eyes which tells me I’m crazy
They see the skin breaking apart, they think it’s leprosy
I pretend I’m a nice guy
A coward, an evader, a dreamer, a thief
I pretend I don’t know what I’m doing
I touch people and won’t accept what that touch tells me
I’m afraid I’ll scare them and then they’ll kill me
I can see everyone’s got a gun in his mind
I violate them and I violate me
I say I can’t possibly fight all the injustice I see and feel
I ignore my way, I’m driven to literality by hysteria, I live
In the city and don’t know if washing the dishes is more important
Than writing a poem: I’m possessed
By the paralyzing fear that my gods are down: I can’t see.

SF 1974

E'ery Li'l Penis

E’ery li’l penis
Predict a venus

Maybe it nod a eon in a canoe
Sniff’n a Eleanor or 2,

She might be a fuckin gnu
Who know!? She wanta Renew too!

It could be like a muthafucka Mayflower
You know, goin toward a America

Jus a diamond in the mind a de fat man
As the sayin go. A li’l rejuvenatin

‘ll get somethin’ jumpin! Be like
Bumble bee stumblin inside a flower

Fucked up & all full o Buzz
Aimin for nuthin but return trips

Dodgin that hand uncoiling out the fern
Furred with rusty short hair fuzz

Glowing like it do in the jungle hush
Jus as the world was born.

SWIMMER & SEAGULL

I am I
like the gull on the buoy
no more
no less, my mind gleans his thought
he knows me, as I swim by
he doesn’t move
we are both

creatures in the sea’s dream
alive

LASSO

Uno

Driving in Memorial Day traffic
Across the San Joaquin Valley at mid-day
Just as dulled as all the other nullified drivers
Despite wonderful camping at the river
A scene unfolded as I approached the Richmond hills
That stunned me from my daze:

Two Great Danes
Loped onto the freeway and barked!
Scattering cars
Until all lanes stopped: the dogs stood there
Imperious, scornful
Of this herd, barking! What they were!

Dos

An old woman stepped
Whirling her cane overhead,
As if she were about to lasso a vehicle,
Into the middle of Park Presidio Blvd,
Sending cars around her at odd angles, their drivers
Terrified they might have to deal with her.

As I slowed to a stop
She put the rubber tip down on my VW hood
Came around and got in. “Take me home,” she said.
“Somebody stole my welfare check and my fingerprints.”

She rolled out the whole story
On the way downtown to Eddy Street
To her lousy hotel

Where I left her off
In the bright
Tenderloin sun.

2008

THIS DRIVER CARRIES NO CASH

waterwave

thrill that is calm

one creature am I in the green pool

pulsebeat of breastroke I am one

delighted man in the spool of rain unwinding

these mountains. This morning

light in white rapids makes me

delight in what is.

Crisp buckeye leaves tick delicately

as they are blown and gently

shaken in the afternoon breeze

a breeze that changes direction twice a day – long

inhalations and exhalations of the earth’s turning –

breathed along this darkening ravine, cooling us

as snakes ease out of their iron hot rocks

to lie within the river’s enlivening temperature –

all one with the play of life and death here –

man beneath water, man on steep rocks

man with marvelously shaped feet, anciently formed,

man that I am

still in this wandering find

this deepening pool

I pray it carries no gold

merely book-keeping data.

This Driver Carries No Cash

GOING TOO FAST TO STOP

Something has fallen off the truck
What’s in the package
That tumbled from the truck
Still taped up
It bounces on its corners
As another truck blows past it

What’s in the package
Bouncing along the concrete wall
The wall between the bridge
The bridge and the gray cold water
With its murky facets
Below the low dawn sky

Is there something of ourselves
Wrapped in the package
That will never be opened
The package bouncing fatefully
Only a short wall
Between it and the water

It seems to jump by itself
But that’s only the momentum of its fall
Whatever of ourselves is inside
Is at the mercy of its fate
It has no inner direction whatsoever

But there’s something in that goddamn package
I tell you
It’s jumping by itself
Like a Mexican jumping bean
There’s something inside
And it has fallen off the truck
Still taped up!

CEREMONIES

cupped hands proffer
burning oranges
on a billboard

floating candles
in rocking coconut shells
on the Ganges --

to acknowledge the paradox
that the Monsoon gives
and takes life

September, 2008

CRITICAL IMPERATIVES

That
sacred tenderness (sitting)
on the porch watching a tiny spider
scrambling at the end
of its thread caught in the breeze – such a
tiny being riding what to him must be a force
as furious as any apocalyptic horse
held by a strand as thin as a scratch
of light, that comes out of himself! --

that
sitting, and feeling I could not so much
as move the plant
for fear
that shifting its shadow
would upset the order of things. That

against the philosophy – Do It!
And all is a rollercoaster ride of folly!

GENO-CIDE

(heads)

geno-cide

brown smoghaze fades into the infinite today
smothering the hills of Marin from view

dead starfish roll onto the beach in small
sick waves
another weird
dry winter

where is the lyric poet
without clear air?

we eat mushrooms & run around Point Reyes naked
the deer don’t mind us & we hear the wings of crows

breaking overhead, as we lie still in the gray grass

back in the city
we eat pizza & pass out
exhausted, having wrestled another physical day
from the death going on all around
everybody working too goddamned hard for the wrong things

we’re at the top of the seashell: the spirals going faster & faster
we’re at the top & all about to crash & even that’s no news:

what the fuck are we going to do?

(tails)

eleven convicts escaped city jail

A snitch tipped the cops that one
was holed up in a hotel downtown.

They surrounded the place, broke
down doors & windows, shot teargas

into his room: waited. He didn’t come out.
Finally they busted in only to find him sleeping.

“Didn’t the teargas bother you?” they asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “I just
thought it was a little smoggier than usual.”

We breathe the same air, convicts & I.
We have many similar convictions.

Coin of the Realm
SF, 1977

SONG OF A HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT

I read matchbook covers
My mother cried when I quit
I’m in a streetcar tunnel
Riding along, riding alone
Watching my face, my face
Filmed in a related journey.
I see my face that sees me.

When I quit it was raining
I needed the Dean’s signature.
I crossed, recrossed my legs:
He wouldn’t look up
I watched his thinning hair
While he wrote; while he wrote
Blinds clinked lightly behind him.

Outside, wind blew into a tree
And undid her hair in streams.

THE MYSTERY OF REFLECTIONS

Willows trace watery hieroglyphs
as I look through
my reflection
a goldfish swims up brightly
carrying a bubble to the surface
like a thought he found
somewhere on the bottom
I watch him swim
lazily back into the darkness
while clouds coalesce on the surface of my face
they are sliding as the wind
wobbles their reflections even
as it moves the clouds themselves.
Everywhere the world echoes infinite textures.
The continental cloud in the sky separates
into new continents
in my face of water
the domed sky quivers
a Victorian greenhouse in the generations’ old park
quivers to a new eye --
my own, still
center, so long ago born
so newly strange, so alienly
relected.

A GOLD FISH SWIMS UP BRIGHTLY

A gold fish swims up brightly
carrying a bubble to the surface
like a thought it has found
somewhere on the bottom

a pearl of air
that is meaningless when
returned to the atmosphere

then it swims
softly down into the darkness again
as clouds separate like continents
in my undulating face

the unoriginal thought
that a word is nothing but air
is what this fish has brought

the fish cannot speak it
Nor can I retrieve it
From the watery oblivion
where all words reside
until they are spoken

until they are spoken
that mute ache in the human heart

will not subside

A WISH

a wish --

less mundane stress & strife, more
Amor, and the gods’ life!

I’d forgotten the world could reward us
with such a clean October morning

you all read the morning’s headlines
and if you don’t, you somehow
absorb their message of fear:

yet on my apartment’s back porch
a yellow chrysanthemum is silently tearing open
its green covering. That bud is so swollen
with a little watering it has pushed through
with all the force of the sun. What do we know

of such circles of power, invested as we are
in petty intrigues and court news?

I long for a practical attitude among us
that acknowledges this little flower’s push
instead of the traffic’s rush.

I’m not NUMBER ONE
and hold up no finger
though I strive for excellence and beauty
like any man inspired by a giraffe’s graceful gallop.

1979

JULY 6

This is the season of burrs
oblong purses that catch
shoelaces, snatch straps even
in your rubber flipflops, work
their way between your toes
when you merely go out to move the hose
so you come back appareled
in these little sojourners --
tough tenacious survivors
riding the dry heat
spikey seeds, their nest
around them, better
than legs,
better than wings
they use those that move
never moving

this is also
my mother’s birthday
she loved summer
in her honor
today I’ll swim, long
sidestrokes in the river
below the rapids, pulling
the darkening sky across its purling
surface in her memory.

30 YEARS ON 100% COMMISSION

An acorn is my worry stone
picked up still green
when ferns feathered a waterfall.

Nut-brown now but stirring
still in wise passiveness
cautioning me against selfblown
urgencies. Panic’s the thief
of dwindling years
when we relish
the light on a building
the mood in every face.

A commemorative bench
next to that waterfall would be
fitting memorial for my father.

He used to sit in the backyard
next to the little plastic fountain
sipping a highball in the dark,
planning his strategy
not a dime coming in
the first of each month.

ZENNY'S

Buddhism can kiss my ass
the zen center puts up a restaurant at fort mason
with a view of the bridge, the boats bobbing around
the hills across the bay --- million dollar property
why? just because they're a religion
& not a restaurant like any other restaurant?
they play up the richies
I could tell by the way they let me wait around
before seating me, because I was dressed like I was,
buttons off my coat and shit
they lay out cloth napkins and so on
there's a couple of retired admirals from the marina
one in a real sporty yellow & blue coat & wearing
soft shoes --- little do they know
buddha is grinning in their ear as he sucks
the blood from their pension dollars:
oh well, they've done their share,
& don't have too far to go. the waitress looks so anxious
to please I'm afraid to ask her for more coffee
out of fear that she'll have a nervous breakdown
& the maitre d is another street casualty
the woodwork is nice, but you couldn't afford it
in a normal restaurant, fucking capitalism
would make that impossible,
you've got to have a system of slaves
to make nice things, it seems, although for my part
you can shove the whole bunch of crap into the ocean
& go back to eating off a log. culture
can kiss my ass as well, but then here I am
lapping up the aesthetic environment, although ambivalent:
god I hate anything halfway organized
I must be some sort of off the wall species
this is the way into the new bureaucrateze: zenease
or Denny's? which will it be?
the zen den at fort mason
will make you a better person, Eugene
take off the rough edges

you might as well face it
you've flunked civilization.

Copyright © SF 2005 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

PHILIPPINE SNAKES

You're goddamn right I expect you to smoke it!
Now you listen at this: that cigar's twisted up there like a dogturd on Hugo
Street but it ain't no such a thing.
The fact is, it smokes smooth as the Snow Queen's breath whispering outa
The Sierra,
about springtime, when the snow starts to crack and slide ---
out onto the dried earth just before the clover
pops loose and gets to shakin in the wind under the bright sun.

That cigar's made in the filipines, where they got Bang-
Utot, that attacks a man's chest just before he gets set to dip his wick the
First time.
I got this from Angelina Candelabra, when I was workin at the computer
Center. She says that Bang-Utot
is why they invented this style cigar, all twisted up like it is, and comin
in a pack of three, like the holy trinity,
with a yellow ribbon tied around each end: the shape's
to take your mind off things for awhile, otherwise
the sexual urge inside a young man'll paralyze his lungs,
and he'll pertain to a nightmare, which is that he's chokin to death.

What it is is, there's a monkey sittin on his chest,
a She-monkey, meant to test him, and if he don't come-to and
yell out with his manhood cry, strong enough to crack loose
a ice-floe in the arctic (travelin by way of the San Andreas Fault, sheerin off
just a little more of Point Reyes on the way)
his comin of age won't contribute to the turnin of the world
and he'll have all his blood vessels in his lungs
bust loose and drown his sorry ass --- which'll be the monkey's revenge
for all those times her sorrowful soul has had to witness
that monkey soup they make down there
with all the little hands floatin around in it.
All things has got to be avenged
in some way or other: so you got to smoke one of those cigars
clean down to the twist
and blow out with the prettiest thoughts you can imagine
so as the snow can drift between to the Filipines, through the etheric
astral id, and fill up the coconuts with white meat for the monkeys to eat,
which'll be earmarked as having come from your own soul,
bein as how you wished it out through your own breath:
if you do that, things'll go alright on your honeymoon night;
otherwise, you're a goner --- so go on and smoke that cigar
wishin good thoughts as you blow, so as you learn the difference
between a habit and a ritual.

Copyright (c) Gene Berson, 2005. All rights reserved.

AUGUST 15th

to proceed from within
where the lion sleeps in the tree

this now
the opportunity again while blood
beats in our veins always
this now, now this August fog
blowing

over the faded green awning that shades the produce store, fog
reflected in the real estate office window, rearing

breaking – to explode silently against the brick wall, to fall
coil and slink

low into the alley where Bear died
fog around shadowy eucalyptus trees

muffling them as if they were ourselves soundlessly dancing
– my arm on your shoulder --

Hail sweet breath whose sharing we are
and we speak! of ordinary things!

SF 78

SPRING CITY

The jackhammer machine guns the pavement
rattling morning windows
muffled the deeper it bites, crumbling asphalt
tumbles up
concentration shattered

the fragile chamber where a trellised choir
unhinges the gift from the sun
to loosen my tongue pulses
with the backup beep of the bus.

Spring is really here!

ETHERIC KNEES

Lend me the frayed end of a cloud
lift me to the rose ---
not the aftermath
but one that attracts the dew

and brings you into view.

this is summer; in a rarer air
we’ve never spun a finer faire ---

a sunlight bloom on a thread of blue
joins me to you and you to me.

the feeling that I’m moving
is what I crave, and with you

my roving center turns around a core
a core of calm that stills my fear

so long as you are you and I am I
we can entwine the universe

one more time. In a time of crumbling
bombed out buildings
we hover near our chamber

an ear to the sea --- a momentary slumber
and deeper communion
than we could ever share in domestic tedium.

All around us flares cut the night
streak our vision with children’s screams.

We acknowledge another version
numbed and shocked, we touch each other ---
a miracle, a miracle ---

singers to the end, praise of hate
for killers blinded to their fate

we hover near blue roses
trembling at their etheric knees

dress our hair in blue petals
and squeeze drops like tears

we’re too traumatized to shed.

SF, 74

OUR TORN ROOTS ARE ALIVE

So what aesthetic
Can come
From constant interruption?

The Praise Houses
Come to mind for some reason

Where voices could be heard
Five miles away, voices
Before Ma Rainey that sang --

Our need to sing
Stronger than our need to sleep --
and perhaps even

more compelling our need
To find a unifying voice
Formed in the throat’s cauldron

where the necessary angel’s wings,
persistently scrape the iron sides
Like scratches on an old recording,

Distract us with her struggle to fly
From the flames
On a coherent song.

Copyright © 2005 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

BOTANICAL CORRESPONDENCES

I cut these cattails
while the sun is low in the evening sky

I cut these cattails
while the white egret stands as though carved
over her rippling image

as I cut these cattails the wind drowns
their small cries, calling out to me from my own skin

this is what I say:
I cut you to put you into our home
so that our lives
may aspire to your simple form

one or two
so that we may learn to live
with the patience of reeds
so that we may learn to live as you grow

along the shoreline, food for birds
medicine for people
inhabit that fringe between water
and the tough blackberries and willow trees

I cut you cattails
to carry your spirit into our home

so that we may enkindle it
in our own lives, and so live to protect
all your kind: we become you

we become you
and the wind rustling your flat leaves is the turning
of the dead and the unborn
in my own hand that holds the knife steadily

and I pray you find my heart in accord
with my hand, and my tongue
living within what I see

with these hopes I cut your stem
and acknowledge the tear
and the absence of the tear in my own stomach

Copyright © 2005 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

SHARDS OF SONG

CAN YOU HEAR THE SUICIDE BOMBER SINGING?

The hummingbird in my heart is a suicide bomber, for the world has placed the poet in Solitude: and, in a world of people falling through the atmosphere without ears, our job now, as Henry Miller says, “is not to generate warmth, but to seek a virus that society must allow itself to be injected with or perish. It does not matter whether the artist preaches love or hate, freedom or slavery; he must create room to be heard, ears that will hear. . . . If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion, at his own appointed time.”

Now, forty-five years after those words were written, the suicide bomber speaks every day on the front page. The metaphor of the artist as a suicide bomber has become literalized, his words unheard except for the screams of his victims and the sirens wailing in his wake. The suicide bomber, it turns out, is a woman who was calmly in her second year of law school, capable, accomplishing goals, when the call came. Serenely, responding to the pearl of dedicated death that was her life, she turned silently within herself, put on her explosive vest and went and blew herself up. That commitment was her counselor, her keel in a wasteland of illusion where people are trying their damnedest to eat everything around them, literally, until the most patriotic thing any American can now do, and any other people subjunctively yearning for the latest gadget, is to get a good Tarzan comic book and sit on a toilet and take a phenomenal Shit. We must shit until we feel life easing from us like a smooth train, endless, carrying away an entire century, carrying the Jews on the way to Dachau, the Cambodians whose skulls have been used as retaining walls, the suburban rainbirds squirting through slats of the rickety railway cars as they pass, snapping shadows in half, squirting into the malls of polished terrazzo, shaking the tinsel in the domed sky lit lobbies at Christmas time as people wrack their nerves with obligations they imagine they have, buying tennis-shoes, ties, cell phones, massage chairs, blankets – every object an objet d’Art - every box of Q-tips and bottle of peroxide, every box of Pampers and every box of Depends, every CD and book and shimmering green shawl, every saw, drill and tool, every notebook and cosmetic compact and tube of lipstick, every brassiere, corset, support hose and bracelet, every atomizer full of poisonous perfume, every bottle of Clorox, every piper cub leaving a nostalgic sound in the atmosphere at every air show, every child trying to eat cotton candy like a snail squeezing together its vulvaic lips to clean algae from the walls of an aquarium, every subway token now in the Smithsonian, carefully encased next to a shoelace made obsolete by Velcro, every powder puff used on the face of a newscaster before his broadcast about every bridge between the hand and the heart collapsing due to adrenal glands that have been exhausted by worry – all this must ultimately pass through the bowels as Tarzan swings through the jungle. Shitting is now perhaps the most patriotic act we can accomplish, patriotic not to the country, for nationalism has been obsolete for decades, but patriotic to the earth herself. Please, Please will everybody, every Muslim on his carpet with his fanny in the air five times a day, every shopper, every Malaysian chipmaker, every plastics worker and turbaned Sheik sitting in the kiosk of an all night gas station in Sunnyvale, please, will everybody, every fourth chair symphony bass player and hip-hop spinning DJ please go at once to the only temple left available to us and take a long meditative shit just to at least, finally, be thoroughly involved in the act of giving back.

Copyright © August, 2007 by Gene Berson. All rights reserved.

MEXICO LETTER

Dear Mom and Dad,
This place, this
tropics, is . . . lime-green lizards long as your arm, crabs
come out jungles into your headlights Splat!
like broken lightbulbs, thunderstorms ---
just wait. I’ve been building up to this letter.
All those letters from YMCA camp,
all those letters from the army about Korea and Kansas,
they were all just buildups. Everynight
S-O-S pad-colored clouds sit close overhead: Rain,
Rain, Rain: red snakes, mangoes, coconuts, warm black water at night:
hail popcorning everywhere, turning into worms on your skin. . . .
Last night we fucked while it stormed while the
Mexicans ran a Dracula movie
in an open courtyard below our window --- just wait, just
wait --- I can’t tell you how wet everything is
Pick Pick Pick
all the time at your skin like it’s a shirt when you
first get here: I had to peel
my arm off her stomach like scotchtape, my ear was stuck
to her thigh like a rubber dart, a wet-lipped stethoscope, semen
glistened like snail tracks on her pussy . . .
I licked them, Mom! I licked in there like an eel,
in that salty, anchovy heaven. When I sat up
there was this big roach, this
big potato-bug-size roach crawling into one leg of my swimming trunks.

I smashed him with my sandal like a tube of toothpaste: pus
oozed out of him --- Yuuuuuuuck! O Mom!
I feel so cuntright I can’t stand it!
It feels so good! (adolescent adolescent)
Our toilet was brimming four days worth. Paper
bloated like bodies in there:
I picked him up still wiggling by one leg, delicately, like an earring
his feelers going like a blind man’s stick and I peed: O it hurt
like it does after a fuck but I peedright
into that mouthcloudfacedtoiletpaperpuffedout: then
sloshed through the two inches of water on the floor and stood
under the showerhead, pulled the rusty chain and felt the cold, ball-bearing rain,
dropped my head back like a puppet, mouth open, digging it.

I have to stop now but just wait, just wait. This
is just the beginning. Beginning:
Your loving son

EVENING FOG'S YCUMEN IN

I overheard
the middle-aged gentleman
say to himself, as he seemed delighted to retrieve
an almost unsmoked cigarette
from the pebble-textured trash receptacle on Fourth & Market
“. . . relinquish the chastity pose . . .”

he dropped this pearl, no doubt dearly earned,
in my ear for free
as I was vacuumed along with the crowd
down the BART stairs into the tube,
wishing I’d had the presence of mind
to slip him a twenty,

the moment already gone.

SF July, 08

IN THIS CASE

Click on photo to enlarge and BACK arrow to return.

A BARBED BLOOM

Reading in random snatches
I find a common theme
Freedom, personal or collective
Scorned for comfortable pain

Nostalgic voices people are used to
Carry them away from here
In them they find illusory communion
To salve a common yearning

Slaves are everywhere
Especially in our hearts
Occasionally a cactus erects
A barbed bloom

Every hundred years or so
Lifting with it the rains
Of a century stored in its veins
Allowing the air its blossom

Such patience! Let’s wait
It out like that
Not move until we want to
And in that wanting feel

“the stars throw down their spears”

TULIP

The pink is disappearing
the bloom opening
like a hand, held
down and
bending the green stem
lower
as I eat my cereal

saying here, here
I am
dying and
leaving a roomful
of pink

you can just feel

all this without a word
amidst the disarray
of the table

and the woman
who occasioned
these flowers has gone
for the time

being

suddenly very quiet
around here

Copyright © 2009 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

BOTH OF US

We editorialize
Suffering -- merely a plastic bag
Dented by wind, crusht,
Can seem to slowly
Lift an edge
As if the wind were carefully
Turning an invalid
An angel’s hand slipping
Under a head too heavy now

To raise the mere thing
Like a ribcage flattened
Then full in turns, ripping
Past the windshield snatched
by sacred air

A being already beyond us
As we, mired so complacently

And gratefully in the midst
Of life, barely dare

To realize how the wind ministers
To us, pours over us, attends
To our thinning hair, our

Thoughts slackening
With the tide

O the care
The care we are capable of
As we hurry by

A bag lifted above the traffic
One of us finally free

Leaving us
Enraptured.

Copyright © 2009 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

WHY DO I LOVE LISTENING

Why do I love listening
To the rainy streets
Amplifying the sounds of cars
Passing with a slow draw
As if giants were unsheathing
Their swords, where every straight line
Seems to waver on the verge of being
Something else? A rhetorical
Question, given the level of intoxication
People seem to be going for
Drunk on things and so on –

The rainy streets offer a refuge
Like a membrane between
A too solid world
And another.

Copyright © 2009 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

SHIPPING DATE

when will we arrive
cushioned by our own
waiting -- as people,
we mix it up until
we’re confused, like an old man
exploring his face in the mirror
trying to discover someone he can recognize,
and we fish around

searching the appearance of those around us,
perhaps beguiled by a gesture
that we seem to remember
of a girl in the fourth grade we
once knew who is now
embodied in a transformed child
foreign to us yet familiar,
or get hung up on an old neighborhood,
trying to remember how it was --
a business or two gone --
a Russian deli
now a Chinese dim sum place
the sidewalk itself
darkened by thrown out
cottonseed oil at night
is host to different sounds:

“Where are you from?”
the most common
question now in China
and we are asking, “When
will we arrive? What was
the shipping date? Can we
track -- us? We’ve been sent. We’re coming.

And this is just the beginning,
from what scientists say:
oceans are rising to reclaim us.
Those in Bangladesh
will crush into already crowded
Calcutta, and Lima
will become the desert it is
once again. How

will we recognize ourselves
when it, the new package, arrives
the new geography of selves
shaped by our anticipation
and, strangely familiar,
delivered by horrifying suffering
and startling opportunities to be
our undiscovered selves.

Copyright © 2009 Gene Berson All rights reserved.

EASTER, 2009

With birdseed that sparkles
like crushed
topaz on the carport
roof I begin this holy day
making my observances --
the rusting seavan,
black garbage bags swelling
so silently on top
under the sun

in the parkinglot
behind the Laundromat
the Laundromat with about
18 aluminum vents
on the roof quite
silvery, actually,
beneath the cumulus

clouds bulging higher
edged so sharply by gray
They seemed carved

I don’t think I’ll ever get over them
when I notice

the couple that lives in their car,
hood up, trunk open and she
seated on a stool
as he combs her hair in the sun

dipping his comb into a bucket of water
occasionally, silently
snapping a whip of waterdrops
off the end of it before leisurely
resuming combing

so that in the middle of everything
everything they do is done
carefully, for example, how he shaves
in the sideview mirror, and folds
his little towel so precisely

forget time, now, that’s gone
you don’t think Christ in the underworld
underwent his last temptation
in three days do you…I mean
it was an eternity at least

as long as this mix of marvels:
my improbable birch tree
it’s thin limbs pulled down by plump
sparrows that watch
me bring my coffee cup

to my lips. When’ll he throw out
more seeds. When O when
will he get on his job! I am

in this world, that’s for sure --
just ask the birds. Yes I am grateful

for the El Tio Juan taco trailer
fate has put
next to the Laundromat
where everyone gathers

to watch soccer and washing machines’
round windows wet
clothes make faces in
children make faces back at

and a mix of languages annealed
by bickering into an amalgamated lingo
we’ve yet to parse: whoozit!

May we deserve such beauty
so ugly and real all we can do
is be stunned by wonder we
wonder what we can do to make doing
nothing holier than something
for nothing’s sake
to help our poor world

this rich Persian rag of a world
so comical with its horror
with its little store, painted like the Mexican flag
run by Arabs who hand me change
with a disdain so dismissive
its infuriatingly murderous

our poor rich world
with its headlines
of international events --
Christ! This neighborhood is an international event!

Thank you for the pleasure it affords!
Mariachi music out the front door
rap out the back
me at the helm on my porch
totally in charge of nothing
but birdseed, coffee, and reading
Yeats! For Christ’s sake! Look at the sparrows!

some focused on seeds
some focused on the cat licking its paws
as it reclines in the ivy
that has climbed with spring-green leaves
shining up onto the carport roof
left over from the fifties:

everything proceeds from where it is
everything is transforming itself
like a million christs emerging from the underworld
or rummaging around
in the underworld off my back porch

buoyed by our sin of pleasure in horror.
The smell of bacon! The refuge
of what is at hand: my neighbors
seem to be Mayans, and next to them
Vietnamese, and across the street
an old white couple continuously prepare their car
for a trip to another world

and Flo, with her two boys
and the neglected dog, and the birds
who have discovered seeds sparking
like brown sugar on a fiberglass roof
while around the corner at the Hells’s Angels’
headquarters the throats of motorcycles are snapped
into fire purely
for pleasure

O world you never deny us
our pleasure you give more and more beauty on top
of ugliness so real it turns
into torrents heaving up telephone poles, sirens spiraling and the flight
of light through our minds to continue to ignite

our hearts until we get off the dime.
Yes, I ask, Who’s going to pick up
that old entertainment center even the Mayans threw out.
Inertia
will carry it downstream along with everything else.
What we have is the ride
and the precious ride we carry within

and I am
at the helm as I nose my canoe
into the rapids and head for the falls.

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

Hunh?

It’s all about me
Me is what it’s
All about, just me
Not her, not you, I
Am what it’s all about

A sowbug,
Rolled up tighter than a bb,
Is being nudged
Across the deck by the dog
With an enormous nose

I can almost hear
From over here
The sowbug clenching
Its scream inside itself tight
As a musical note
Praying nothing
Hears it, trying to be
Quite inanimate

Natural Sequence

First there was a man on a couch
so into the Giants that when the Braves beat them
he switched the channel
to local weather, where the weatherman’s voice
thrilled with factitious enthusiasm
because of on-the-spot pictures
sent via cell phones from local observers
featuring storm clouds culminating above Lake Tahoe that

second: the man heard the wind in the high oaks
until he went outside and stood on the deck
where a shadow swiftly rippled across the meadow
like the shadow of a hawk but was that of a leaf
loosened by a sierra breeze and released
it being mid-august in the foothills

third: the scalloped leaf quietly joined its shadow
settling on thorny points like a green crab
on the path where it lay until night
fourth: a fox on velvet feet
its mind full of scent, alert for danger
came on the leaf, perfectly centered in the path,
upon which he uncoiled his little gift
skillfully avoiding going over the edges
so that it seemed deliberately
presented as if on a plate or, if you will,
in the palm of God’s hand

fifth: sending a thrill through the heart of the man’s wife,
“Look at this!” she declared,
sharing the gift with him
allowing them to marvel in mutuality
at the fox turd proffered on the leaf.

GENE BERSON - A Biography

Scanned from: HONEYDEW: an anthology. Selected by Bill Vartnaw.
Published by TAURIAN HORN PRESS,San Francisco, California in 1974

Eugene (Gene) Berson was born in the Pleiades during the Thang Dynasty. His father was a typewriter salesman, his mother was not. He grew up in Redwood City where there were no redwoods and before it was much of a city. Of his childhood, he gives us the following Place Essay that he wrote on 4 - 24 - 1990 for Eng 418 - Final Draft:

I remember driving down El Camino Real with my father when I was six, sitting on the edge of the seat so that I could look out, bracing myself between the back of the seat and the dashboard of our ’51 Studebaker, and noticing for the first time a green sign that arced just to the side of the road: REDWOOD CITY Climate Best By Government Test population: 10,000. I remember this as the first time I had an inkling of the city I lived in, a city of ten thousand people. Until then I had moved through the ripples that surrounded me in a more concrete way, exploring my house, my backyard, the chicken coop, the bamboo, my front yard, my block, the almond trees, the cow field, the marsh and so on, moving out in a widening circle until I reached that sign, which rewarded me with something intriguingly abstract – the idea of my city – which contained ten thousand people besides me.

As time went on, I would consult that Redwood City sign as if it were a thermometer of the population, noticing that we were now fifteen thousand, now twenty thousand, now thirty thousand – until when I left town only eleven years later, the population reached one hundred twenty-five thousand. The effect this rapid population increase had on the enchanted world of my early childhood left me with an uneasy feeling that places I loved the most were likely to be destroyed.

One of the most important places that this influx of people took away was the fields – certainly the dominant terrain I explored as a child. There were fields everywhere at that time. The end of my block culminated in the cow field, which swayed with wild mustard and red-winged blackbirds in the spring, and billowed with sparkling hay in the summertime, rising and falling like the sea itself. We crawled through its high spring grass and build forts in its hay bales in August. The cow field embodied the seasons for us, and allowed us a refuge from our parents.

I recall standing in front of my house and looking down the street, realizing how many vacant lots on our block had become houses. I though back to all the ones I could remember having been lots and counted twenty-four on our block alone! It was easy to remember them because each one had a specific character and purpose of its own; vacant lots belonging to us kids, since nobody else used them or knew them as intimately as we did. We even knew which weeds grew where and when they would appear. I seemed to me that the world of the adult, which was the world of house-building, was eating up our territory, shrinking the areas where we played.

As time went on, all the places we held sacred as children were built on or changed so much that the mysterious presences we felt inhabited them diminished beyond sense, just as our childhoods faded into memory. The cow field at the end of the block became Ampex Corporation, and the marsh, which held a primeval hush and where a great blue heron once fanned my heart with its great wings, gradually filled up with wrecking yards and trailer courts. Oak trees that challenged us to climb them and inspired heroic efforts, such as walking out dangerous limbs to tie ropes to for swinging, were collared by parking lots, the once vast fields that were their natural dominion eventually insulting them with cars and asphalt. We could no longer raise chickens and we were stopped by police if we had slingshots hanging out of our back pockets. Our dogs could no longer roam free. As we grew up we realized that the mythical realm we had known as children had indeed disappeared.

As a result of this, people my age, as they married and had kids of their own, began to move away, to find a place with a similar, quasi-rural atmosphere where they could simulate the Redwood City that had sheltered their early years. It’s natural for people to try to raise their children in an environment similar to the one they grew up in, just as fish and birds return to their original spawning or nesting grounds. So the natives began to move, as most people in California are in transit, but their quest was to find a place that would allow them to stay where they had been: they were moving to different places, to Santa Cruz, Nevada City, Oregon and so on, so that they could stay in the same time.

When these people moved, usually following a vague urge to escape the problems of urbanized areas, perhaps acquiescing to that form of despair known as nostalgia, they became part of the problem that originally displaced them – for they required housing and jobs in their new areas. I have a friend, for example, who recently moved to Oregon, a move made possible, incidentally, because the house he bought in San Francisco for $19,000 in 1974 sold for $110,000 twenty two years later, and he tells me that Oregonians are increasingly resentful of Californians coming into their state and driving the cost of housing beyond the local resident’s price-range.
Of course, this is exactly what has happened in San Francisco, with the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong, Nicaragua, the Philippines and many other places, and this is also what has happened in Redwood City. The cow field I revered was merely the last vestige of the old Sweeney Ranch, some of which was lopped off to build the house I lived in. I happened to live there when the landscape still preserved some of its wild power, when some of its bird life still flourished there. The neighborhood I grew up in is now similar in feeling to LA. The people who live there probably do not feel the presence of the marsh, which has been filled in.

But I feel it, like an amputated limb. I recall being lured across the highway to that marsh – a primeval region where all lived in a prehistoric hush: fog surrounded me as I walked across the levees of the salt flats, until I felt alone in the world; and the croak of a great blue heron, like bark cracking, would break the stillness. A part of me was awakened as I attended that stillness. A part beyond my family and my school, something that felt at home in the wild. Perhaps that’s what people hope to find as they move from place to place, ironically destroying what they seek in their wake.

When I think now of that Redwood City sign I realize what puzzled me was trying to reconcile that natural world with the man-made world. The sign showed me that the government, another abstract entity, knew about my city and had anointed it with a test of its weather, proclaiming it to be the best: REDWOOD CITY Climate Best By Government Test population: 10,000. This proclamation seemed a little odd to my young mind, as indeed it does to me now. I had never conceived of the weather as a constant, a vanity. That day was certainly a sparkling day. At that time there was no smog whatsoever; I can remember standing on my back porch looking east to the dreamlike San Gabriel Range that floated pinkish beige and black, like a giant pinto grazing in another realm, with no smog to dull the view.

It’s strange to think that my generation is the last to view those hills clearly on hot days, for a hot day now will bring the brown smog haze to smother those hills from view.

Berson has an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. Roethke, Lawrence and Yeats were early major influences. He coordinated the Poetry in the Schools program for two years, and was a member of the Poet’s Coalition. His work has appeared in Honeydew, Transfer, Academy of American Poets Contest 67-69, and American Poetry Review. You can contact him at Bersone@comcast.net.

Gene Berson

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