Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

When the poet hard rain was falling
when words fell like hard rain,
when skies cried and poets died
in the ancient rain, in the jazz rain
rain rain rain running down the street
in little floods of memory from the sky

songs of the stars playing in each drop
each drop a story of tears, poets bleed
from their pen, wine wine wine rivers
of red on city corners, ten thousand
ten thousand, ten thousand things

the poet sings of city lights and the alley
from China town to the neon night of signs
raining in the darkness on the blood of the air
when the golden sardine swam in the gutter
and the surrealist walked down North beach hills
the moon burning a hole through the cloud spills
in search of the poetic marvelous and a cappuccino

"the jazz rain"... man, that's good.
skies died a million-billion times,
to darkness and back again.
geologist rock tappers said so.
they tried to classify it all,
classify time, how do you
classify time?

I'm glad my poems make some thought
I really cannot explain why the words
come out that way, I just get a kind of
feeling of the poetry that I was influenced by
a feeling of when I was first writing poetry
because Bob Dylan was there before
as was Bob Kaufman, or a lot of the poets
that I read, or ever head read their poems
I don't want to live in the past, but when
I think of the poets that influenced me
they were there before me, I read about
a black poet recently that is famous
that said he was influenced by Bob Kaufman
Bob was like a surrealist/jazz poet

I guess a poem is kinda like digging for words
in strange places, in meanings that still
exist in some far memory that may just be
lost or found, poetry still holds on to that
in spite of all the lies we are told, to take
poetry away and replace it with fake facts

because somebody told you to, who is that
Bob Dylan is kinda of a mystery, but in the
beginning he was kinda surrealist, he read Rimbaud
also the surrealist in North Beach, Philip Lamantia
was a big influence on the Beats, William Burroughs
used the cut up technique, which was what the Dadaists
were doing, which became refined with the surrealists

every new poem might be said to be a part of an old poem given all that came before...not so much word for word but a mish mash of poetic energy....we can't help but borrow, but hopefully add a new wrinkle, that leads to a new wrinkle