klipschutz
Originally published in The Evergreen Review Issue 119 in August, 2009.
“I was never really a member of the Beat Generation.”
—L. Ferlinghetti, 1990
I was a vegetable,
and I was red,
and I was diced,
and I was in some famous salads.
I was loosely affiliated
with a lot of fruit,
I was canned, I was sweet,
but I was never really a beet.
It’s true I was an anchovy
once for Halloween.
Rootabaga Stories?
That doesn’t prove a thing.
This is the end of the line, this is me,
the last block puts the bitch
back into North Beach.
Lord Buckley doesn’t live here anymore.
Which doesn’t stop the shoulders of a saint,
the author of a traveling scroll,
from threading through the downfield
all alone now in a dream.
The young kids come around
armed with ancient envelopes,
waking up old ghosts on Russian Hill.
Question lists get baptized with good beer.
They sleep it off in live-work spaces
South of Market, where
misconceptions give breech birth
to cubicles.
The empirical evidence is in:
The sky is made of pesto
and the Aurora Borealis. . .
never mind.
You call this a revival?
I call it borscht.
