Rain Dancing on the Oakland Streets

By The Light of the Argon

The Master Isherwood
once from the south
so deep
so far into the depths
no one ever goes down there anymore,
Now his son lives in Westwood
nightly steamy sawed off soulfests
works in a punk band called Blood
on the Strip near The Whiskey,
The bar maid owned an old truck
and parked it out back under an awning,
when it rained she'd crawl inside
and listen to college radio,
One day she gave notice at the bar
had enough of LA and the Strip
decided to drive up through Canada
through Painted Woods outside of Bismarck
then onto the Badlands
and the dark forests of the Dakotas
along the wide Missouri,
One late afternoon while putting up her tent
down past an old creek in a cul de sac
she found an old Mandan Indian stash of Custer's gold
he'd stolen from the Apaches just before Little Big Horn,
Now she's living in the South Of France
with a girl named Lilli Marlene
smart as a bell as one can tell,
She loves to sit nude in the sun
and read Mark Twain
sipping on Mint Juleps in the rain

Ode to Marlene Dietrich in Combat Boots

My father during World War II was a B-17 pilot stationed from 1942 to 1944 in the UK. A great story he told me,
when he took leave to London to chase some British gal he had been seeing. While he was gone Bob Hope, Bing
Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and that whole gang did a show for the troops at his base. He was sorely bummed, though
later he got to see Marlene Dietrich perform and that he says made up for everything, including the war.
He also saw one of his favorites, Burl Ives sing and play guitar.

Desert Station

Out along the American desert, even today with cars and trucks things change, views change. You can feel the buried skulls, the arrow tips and the spent cartridges and the Indian wars and the settlers buried out in the flat lonely sanding cactus strewn landscape.
You can hear murmurs of Cochise or Chief Joseph, Crazy Horse, American Horse and even Sitting Bull carrying Custer's scalp.
Occasionally the howling of Geronimo coming off a bluff and the blood curdling moments of your last breaths on the desert.

Even at a lonely gas station out in the nowhere of the American desert there are colors you have never seen and cloud formations so alien you wonder if you are not really in the Sahara with Sophia Loren.

Once Twice, I Think I Now Recall

the days of the wood
(at the feet of the dog)

most people were too busy
to notice the sinking ship
not that far off the coast
past the last light of the pier
on a dim day off the coast of freedom,
it seemed slow in its aching demise
and I just watched and waited
and studied how she went down

flowers and shadows
night and day
waiting for a leaf to drop
and the thoughts of Dunkirk