VALENTINE’S DAY … Once I left the seminary back in the Sixties, I got to be full-on romantic. Poetry, not the priesthood, held me in thrall. Riding around San Francisco on a Honda 250 with my opera jacket, long beard, and flowers in my hair, my wife’s scarf floating Isadora Duncan-style behind us down San Francisco’s Mission Street, as we wove our way in and out of traffic towork downtown …
Valentine’s was a favorite holiday, even though, like so many American holidays, its genesis was murky. Mostly legend …
I loved crafting Valentine poems for lovers, wives, old friends… I did that up until my last love affair, here in Colorado, after my wife died. We met at a funeral for David – one of Telluride’s legendary loners who I’d see in town and then at Rainbow Gatherings, where he was a healer of last resort. She died not long after we met. And in healing from cancer, I had to take a drug that cut off all my testosterone.
Kissed
-for Ariel
Saw a rainbow
driving the back way
from Naturita Canyon to
Cloud Acre
hauling water
Thought of you, wise woman
Growing everything in pots
hidden in the cottonwoods
of Paonia River Park’s
Peaceful Lane
Made me smile
I’m not sure
if the stars are aligned
for you and me
But I know kind
Give it a kiss
RAINBOW GATHERING 1978 … Sitting on wet rocks after Rainbow Gathering at Oregon highway truckstop hot springs, I kick back all bliss & blue crystal. And goddess bless if some hungry water snake poking upstream don’t go kiss my bare-ass foot, dangling in the riffles by sulphur pools. Don’t go tickling my instep with the cold revolver of her stub nose …
What can I do but surrender, dumbstruck, to the only dance there is?
Sunlight leaping branches
The sure black stripe of the centipede
Dusk’s ecstatic needles oming in the breeze
unattached & golden
YES, GOTH IS POLITICAL! … was the lead story in the December issue of the The Revolutionist #24, the feisty far-left tract published in the Western Slope’s Grand Valley by Jacob Richards (subscriptions at PO Box 163, Fruita CO 81521, or go online at https://therevolutionistgj.org). Their motto on the masthead reads “Revolution is simply the culminating point of Evolution”…
The Goth story, written by Vampirebait, affirms: “Goth is not just about the music or the fashion. It is and has always been an intentional movement that challenges the status quo – anti-racist, very pro-queer and pro-inclusivity, anti-consumerist, class-conscious, sex positive” …
In the Dec. issue there’s an instruction piece, “What to Do if You See ICE Activity;” an update on ICE arrests in Colorado; a book review of Charles Quimby’s Not So Far From Home: Owning Homelessness in my Own Backyard (Itaska Books, Minneapolis, 2025); an interview with GJ activists Juan Espinoza (a Vietnam vet and co-editor of the Mesa College Criterion who published the Somos Aztlan magazine in the Seventies) and Deborah Espinoza (a museum director for History Colorado and temporary director of the Aztlan Research center at Colorado State University at Pueblo); news briefs on political events on the Western Slope; and a poem on Socialism by Kathrine Stokes published in 1921 (her family moved to Palisade in 1898 and started Stoke’s Coal Mine) – an excerpt from the poem below:
Then let us all be Socialists…
[T]ake our brother by the hand
And practice what we preach…
[A] hand …bruised and soiled,
From laboring hard and sore…
[L]et us take him to our hearts,
And love him all the more
SWEET MEMORIES … As an elder poet now, no longer inflamed with the passions of youth but with lots of time alone to reflect on a roller-coast life that led from the catacombs of the Vatican to the Haight-Ashbury to Colorado’s Western Slope, I have the privilege and good fortune to think back.
PROSTATE CANCER
Eunuch. That’s what they used to
call us, those denied blood flow to our
sweet pricks via surgery or chemistry
& yet Capt. B doesn’t miss the urgency
into lust’s dark corners. Those Fifties’
closets without escape hatches. The mice
infested cupboards. So, this Valentine’s
as one inexorably approaching the mystery
the good Captain conjures up past lovers:
The daredevil Noe Valley neighbor initiating
naive hippie into the ritual of french kissing
The Alaskan free spirit squealing in delight
in the mud bath of an Oregon hot springs
The Zen nun-of-the-above in Bernal Heights
orchestrating a fortissimo orgasm to Chopin’s
piano glissandoes – virtuosos wildly in synch
No more hot leaping flames. Just the warmth
of quiet mind’s embers of gold vermillion
