Stuttering in my ear as I
Write this, his image on
My bookshelves with his books
His art on my walls, I only wish
He’d lived long enough
To see it didn’t matter
How famous he did or
Didn’t become, his work
Living on among us
Who love it, exhibited
Often since he passed
Or Tony gone so recently
A young man who went from
Ripping doors off their
Hinges when he was
Upset with his wife and
Kids to the gentlest giant
Of many I’ve known
His ex-skinhead rages
Transformed as he turned
The pages of his life from
Anger to compassion
His punk Buddhist
Practice enabling him
To live with the rare
Brain disease that
Took his physical
Presence from us
But not the love we
Who knew him shared . . .
I think of him every day
As I do a lot who live
Now only in our hearts
. . . oh
Lots of shit dies, like
Almost everything that was
New when I was a boy
Including the people . . .
If you live long enough
So much passes it feels
Like another world . . .
But it’s the same one
Where love never dies . . .
FIGHTING WORDS
Poetry saved my life.
There is no life without poetry.
What life isn’t a poem?
Open my brain, poems fly out.
How do I get the poems back?
That’s not a poem, that’s my life.
“My Life” was my most famous poem.
What life isn’t a poem?
Poetry literally saved my life.
It made me feel not so alone.
It’s not so easy now to write a poem
since the operation on my brain.
But I’d do it again, and again,
because in the end, what isn’t a poem?
SWING THEORY: 5
When I first read about string theory I thought
What about swing theory? The ways the uni-
verse is secretly governed by the same laws
that sparked The Big Band Swing Era, park
swings and taking a swing at something or
someone. I thought of “Swinging On a Star”
or Swing Time I mean the ways reality swings
not just in the Hegelian sense but in the re-
galing sense and sensitivity to the ego swings
and mood swings of The Creator or whatever
force initiated this swinging cosmic vibe we
call Being Here Now, always, where every
sound’s a note in the song of everything, ev-
ery moment a scene in the movie of our lives.
THE VILLAGE SONNETS
(Word Palace Press 2016)
from THE VILLAGE SONNETS (1959-1962)
1
When Nina Simone played THE VILLAGE
GATE I sat on the sidewalk leaning against
the grate above the basement stage, sharing
a bottle of Gallo half-and-half in a brown
paper bag with Destiny and writing poems
to send backstage. She never responded. I
spied James Baldwin once in OBIES. Cliff
said he’d introduce me, but I declined,
having heard he was queer. How would I
handle a pass if he made one? While Bald-
win held court among his admirers, Cliff
told me stories about the people in Harlem
he sold insurance to, as good as Langston
Hughes’ SIMPLE STORIES only more real.
2
I took my ex-nun sister to see Nina Simone
who came onstage in a floor-length dress so
tight around her ankles she could take only
tiny steps to get to the piano, a Geisha girl
walking on ice. I heard rumors about her
love life. She was a lesbian, or married to a
cop, or having an affair with the guitarist the
only white man in her band. I championed
the cause of contrast, fixing that sister up
on a date with my drummer friend Sblibby.
It didn’t work out. Maureen was an artist
and the coolest white Jersey girl I knew. I
fixed her up with Ralphie, my junkie street
friend. That turned out to be a mistake too.
3
Princess was a street fixture from the islands.
I never knew which one. I was with her at
OBIES when I first met Cliff, with Mel and
DeWitt. The only empty chairs were at their
table. When we sat down, they started riffing
about how they’d seen Malcolm speak at
the Harlem mosque earlier that week and
he’d asked Have you kicked a white devil
today? And how little white boys were
polluting the race. When I’d had enough
I stood up and said Which one of you
motherfuckers wants to step outside with
me? They laughed and said Sit down,
we’re just fooling with you kid. And I did.
4
Curtis Powell introduced me to my first
Greenwich Village pad. I was seventeen,
already into the Village scene but as a
Jersey interloper digging it from the street.
He took me to the crib of an old white cat
in his thirties and his dark-haired wife in
her twenties, living with a blonde nineteen-
year-old not only pretty but nice. A pie-
slice studio on Cornelia and Sixth Avenue
with a big bed and little else to sit on and
nowhere else to sleep. It was obvious even
before Curtis hipped me to it, they all slept
together. I thought I preferred black chicks
but if this was beatnik living I wanted some.
5
Curtis was from South Orange, renowned
for French kissing a white girl in the public
pool in 1957 and smart enough to later earn
a scholarship to college and a PhD. Once he
took me to a rundown little flat on East 2nd
in the building where Ginsberg lived. Bob
Kaufman’s crib. He wasn’t in, just his dark-
haired Irish-looking wife Eileen and baby
Parker. I read Kaufman’s SECOND APRIL
for free at Figaro’s and smoked my first
joint after a young black dude invited me
to join him for a stroll around the block,
continuing our deep discussion begun inside
reentering with a whole new perspective.
6
Cliff, Mel and DeWitt lived on West Third near
the strip joints. Mel reminded me of Jackie
Robinson but with a deeper voice and more
eloquent. He spoke German from when they all
met there in the Army after the war. DeWitt was
the Army’s first Negro heavyweight champ. Mel
held the yards gained record for college fullbacks.
Cliff, smaller, thinner and lighter skinned, had
a face freckled like mine. He did so well in the
black market he married the first post-war Miss
Berlin and flew her to the states and a house
on Long Island he paid cash for. When she saw
how race played here, she divorced him and
went on to be the blonde in WHITE RA
IN ads.
7
Destiny was one of the gentlest humans I
knew and the first one with no home at all.
One day he jumped out from a doorway to
pull my coat and when I turned around said
Princess is a dyke, she’s only using you.
And I said Using me? Someone has found
a use for me? Princess wore men’s clothes
that hid a lovely little hourglass figure I
discovered in the bathroom at Mel, Dewitt
and Cliff’s fifth floor walkup where we first
made love. It was one of those tiny ones
with only a toilet and water box overhead
you pulled a chain to flush. They took
baths in the kitchen sink, the deep side.
8
I crashed a Village party with street bros where
Red Mitchell was playing with a small combo.
When they took a break I stood his bass up and
played the melody to MOANIN’. Red made it
clear he didn’t dig strangers playing his ax. I
laid it down but drunkenly tripped, putting a
tiny crack in it with my pointy-toed boot and
was thrown out. For a long time hip Villagers
knew me as the little J.D. who kicked a hole in
Red Mitchell’s bass. At a Brooklyn party Lex
Humphries loaned me a rubber when I asked,
cause Princess insisted. We went up to the
roof, but it was tilted and covered in pebbles
that dug into our backs as we almost rolled off.
9
Met Bob Dylan at THE FAT BLACK PUSSY
CAT before he recorded or I heard him live,
thought he was jive. Passed e. e. cummings in
Washington Square only months before he died.
He looked like an old man, yet bohemian still
in a black beret, a cliché, but not on one from
the generation that created it. Diane di Prima
and Joel Oppenheimer were friendly. Gregory
Corso and LeRoi Jones not. Ginsberg came
across like a pushy hustler at times. Kerouac
drank way too much, like me. We both got 86’d
from THE KETTLE OF FISH. Bob Kaufman,
they said, was part European, African, Asian
and more, which seemed like the future to me.
10
When Sonny Clark’s Trio took a break at THE
WHITE WHALE I sauntered to the piano. Pall
Mall between fingers still able to play, head
drooped toward the keys, a la one of the piano
trinity of my iconic history, Bill Evans, I was
the only white teenage cat with a black soul I
knew. I didn’t notice the drummer return till I
heard the shhh shhhh shhhhh of his brushes on
the snare. Now I really felt solid in my groove.
Shit, the cat dug my sound so much he couldn’t
resist. Then I grinned as the bass joined in. I
was the featured act now, the cats backing Clark
backing me, making music for all the world to
see, especially my new heart’s delight: Bambi.
11
The song came to an end. The bassist whispered
HONEYSUCKLE ROSE, holding up some fingers
to indicate the key. But it was beyond me, and the
tempo they set was like climbing Mount Everest
in shorts and making it to the top before lunch.
After a few bars I felt a body sit down beside me
on the piano bench. Sonny Clark. He gave me a
pathetic look and swung his hip into mine as
though knocking me out of the way. Which he
was. The band wailed, the audience transfixed as
the white kid took a shaky walk back to his table.
I always wore shades except when in bed so the
tears in my eyes didn’t shine in the lights just my
obvious flight from the jazz Olympus in my mind.
14
They called her Bambi cause of her big dark
cartoon-deer eyes that lit up the space around
her. We met in OBIES, the bar on Sixth Ave
across from West Third where I felt most at
home in the world, thanks to a mix of black
and white, old and young, straight and queer,
beat and hip, junkie and boozer, sophisticated
and not, like me who had no idea OBIES was
the name for the off-Broadway theater awards
despite the framed posters of winners on the
walls like RED EYE OF LOVE. I thought
Obie was the owner’s name. One night there
I spied Bambi at a table with other teenagers
called colored or Negro. Or spade on the street.
15
After her eyes it was her skin, dark and smooth
like coffee without cream, her full lips, nose
wide and strong, Indian my spade friends said.
Thin as me, a year younger and just graduated
from a Catholic girls high school in Atlantic
City I learned, after we stop-motion stared at
each other before I pulled up a chair. A strange
sight to her in my Paul Sargent suit, thin tie and
Ray Charles wide-sided shades, a skinny white
boy talking bebop Harlem jive. She and her
roommate lived on Tompkins Square, the first
black chicks there. We made a date. I arrived
with Spanish Harry, who wasn’t Spanish, and
Mamie, the contrast date I’d talked him into.
16
Already drunk I got aggressive, Bambi later
said, as we sat on her bed. She was scared till
I fell off onto the floor and she couldn’t stop
laughing. Next night I came back to see her
again but an old friend from school had shown
up. She was spending the evening with him,
so gave me a rain check. But I never showed,
exposing her I hoped to how much I was hurt,
then felt like a jerk and called to apologize.
She said she waited for hours. Next time we
met at OBIES where we learned we had even
more in common. Like our fathers: self-made,
grammar-school dropouts with high-school
educated wives. Soon we were a Village item.
17
I was known among friends and family for
falling in love at the drop of an eyelash. But
this time was different. Even Mel, Cliff and
DeWitt got the intensity of it. We spent every
second we could with each other, getting close
to making love completely then backing off
to save her virginity for the night of our wed-
ding we needed our parents permission for,
too young to marry in Jersey or New York.
In states where we weren’t, our so-called
races made it against the law. My father said
Men and women are different, so you start
with one strike against you. If the woman’s
not Irish, that’s two. Not Catholic, you’re out.
18
When my music-man brother Buddy wanted
to marry my Italian sister-in-law, there were
whispered admonitions behind closed doors
about what would be in store for them and
their kids. That sense of forbidden fruit fueled
my boyhood crush on her dark Italian beauty.
My father couldn’t argue that we had three
strikes against us: Bambi was Catholic. But
he argued anyway, that our kids would have
it too hard. Out of his hearing, ma said in
each other but I have to back your father,
he’s my husband. Bambi’s father hated
white people for what they’d done to him.
19
The night we gave up any hope of marrying
before she turned twenty-one, three long
years away, I decided Fuck them all. Fuck our
families fuck society fuck the stupid racial laws.
Then we finally made love all the way as she
whispered I’m sorry. I asked What for? That I
couldn’t wait till we were married. But I swore
before God we were husband and wife. She
always said I was her first lover. Though I had
others, like Princess and Dolores, I felt she was
my first too. Later lying in each other’s arms
she said I love you, in a way so surrendered, so
deeply sincere, so much an echo of the feelings
in my heart toward her, I knew it was true.
20
Bambi’s roommate didn’t dig me so we
hung at Mel, Cliff and Dewitt’s talking and
making love when they were out. They gave
us a key. This was before Cliff got his own
place after walking in on Mel having sex
with Cliff’s lady, the Harlem beauty Theresa.
Cliff and Mel were back being friends
before long, but Theresa was gone. Cliff’s
new pad on Thompson had two bedrooms.
He rented one to Bull, a married man who
used it with just a mattress on the floor for
his rendezvous. Bambi and I used it too.
There were no examples of happy and
accepted mixed-race marriages we knew.
21
Mixed couples were rare, and outside The
Village found only in black neighborhoods,
where it was always black men with white
women. My Jersey friends Teddy and Lynn
seemed truly happy, but Lyn worked in an
office in Newark where her coworkers were
not even aware she was married to a Negro.
Her Italian relatives were. And her mother
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