my mentor

[revolutionrabbit]

i ain't superstitious when a black cat cross
my trail...

i ain't, but, the black cat is out of
that Italian bag

cuz them Italians, sure had a stupid-stitious
about then little furry night colored friends

they apparently had a thang about that ol black
cat, magic, they had a baaaaad feelin about that
old baaaad luck

they got it all stuck, up in their sketti head
and oh how they wanted them felines dead dead dead
they was seein all red, when ever one them lil fuzzy
furry critters wanted to pit pat across their fuckin
street, oh i don't know what they was puttin in their
spaghetti, but it wasn't black cat meat

oh there is a cat in egypt by the name of Bast
that has a totally different notion about to treat
them goddess cats,

so them silly people back in Dante' days had better
change their ways

cuz i ain't suuuuuuperstion when those cute little
meaow meaows takes it in their little cat body to
cross that trail...with their cute tail up in the air

and they can go anywhere they please, if they please so
doin the kitty cha cha cha or the cat too see too..
maybe put on Jimmy Smith's The Cat that will do

puuuuuuurfect cat karma, screw your dogma and you stuper

stichin fool

.





in highschool


I did not have one teacher that taught the classes that had any good influence on me, i despised my teachers with purple passion, that manifested as total indifference to my school, i do recall one art teacher that saw the artist in me for a moment.If i had had a teacher that had caught that artist in me and showed me how to make it blossom in my feeling of abject misfit i might have become the artist i wanted to be.As it was when i came out on the other side of the late 60's i found a few books that started me up.The revolutionary poet was born in chaos and psychedelic upheaval.
I finally found a kind of mentor, in a surfer writer/poet that had already written a cat pissed on box full of "the novel" and had a lot of books of famous poets and not so famous.I had already been reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire, my mentor friend was a bit of a cruel task master, he would cross out most of my attempts at poetry.And say oh i think maybe there is a possible line...here, i kept reading the books he gave me and also he could translate French and Spanish.One night i sat down and wrote some automatic writing that was like the seed work of the garden of earthly delights that would grow out of that.
When he gave me Philip Lamantia's phone number and told me to call him, my fate was seven sealed.






oh gads


Between your Tweed patch pipe tamping teacher picking crumbs off his tie, and my hard core crazy acid-head surfer from L.A. that smoked more pot then anyone i had seen and boy do i remember his strange idiosyncrasies, this guy suddenly one day declared that HE was now a Surrealist, this was a few months after i met him.So we were now reading all the surrealism we could get our hands on, and Rik was good at finding everything in the University Library, so i read just about everything, and the stuff that was not in English, French and Spanish poetry he translated into English, i don't think his translations were too bad, but i got to read these works like they were precious as gold.But my "mentor friend" had a dark side that was very hard on me,he was given to wild mood swings, because in his acid-head surfer days as a youth(he was about 4 years older then me)he had been made to get shock treatments by his scientist dad.
So, my journey into the world of Surrealism, that really went on a deep level when i spoke to Philip Lamantia, was also fraught with a strange struggle to find my own identity in the shadow of my surfer pot fiend mentor friend.I can see Rik sitting there smoking a joint and gesticulating and expostulating i can see his menacing eyes darting at his girl friend that also was a poet, when i said something that made him mad.One time we got into a huge argument about who was the reincarnation of Rimbaud, to prove to me who was, Rik grabbed a butcher knife and wielded it around like some character from Rabelais, and then chased me out of the room.There were a lot of other very weird scenes,(i could write a book about) but we did manage to make a local poetry rag called The Velvet Pistol, and at another date put on a poetry reading in a auditorium, that featured William Everson, and other local poets and writers.